William L. Andrews

Born a slave in Virginia in 1856, Booker T. Washington rose in prominence to become black America's foremost spokesman. This is the dramatic autobiographical account of Washington's struggle to succeed and prosper in a country that refused to acknowledge his existence. From his fight for an education to his founding of the world-renowned Tuskegee Institute, Up From Slavery is one of the most significant and defining works in American literature.

In 1865, The Christian Recorder, the national newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serialized The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, a novel written by Mrs. Julia C. Collins, an African American woman living in the small town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The first novel ever published by a black American woman, it is set in antebellum Louisiana and Connecticut and focuses on the lives of a beautiful mixed-race mother and daughter...

The pre-Civil War autobiographies of famous fugitives such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs form the bedrock of the African American narrative tradition. After emancipation arrived in 1865, former slaves continued to write about their experience of enslavement and their upward struggle to realize the promise of freedom and citizenship. Slave Narratives After Slavery reprints five of the most important and revealing first-person...

"This extraordinary volume brings together the first three novels written by Africa-Americans in the 1850s: The Heroic Slave, Frederick Douglass's powerful fictional account of an actual mutiny aboard the slave ship Creole in 1841...Clotel, a provocative expose of slavery by William Wells Brown, who was himself a fugitive slave...and the penetrating and eloquent Our Nig, which focuses on the struggles of one young woman to achieve economic independence...