A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her Life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
At once a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts discovers a tale of love, friendship, betrayal, and violence set against the backdrop of America\'s slide into Civil War..
By drawing on the lives of those she knew in slavery, Crafts summoned into her fiction people otherwise stolen from history.
Hecimovich establishes the case for authorship of The Bondwoman\'s Narrative by examining the lives of Hannah Crafts\'s friends and contemporaries, including the five enslaved women whose experiences form part of her narrative.
After escaping to New York, the author forged a new identity--as Hannah Crafts--to make sense of a Life fractured by slavery.
She was not only the first known Black woman to compose a novel but also an extraordinarily gifted artist who honed her literary skills in direct opposition to a system designed to deny her every measure of humanity.
In this remarkable biography, Hecimovich identifies the novelist as Hannah Bond Crafts.
Over a decade later, Professor Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author\'s name and, in The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts , he finally tells her story.
The novel, The Bondwoman\'s Narrative , was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author\'s identity remained unknown.
In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death.
In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York.
A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her Life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr
