A01=William L. Andrews
abolition
African American
aims
American letters
analysis
antebellum
Austin Steward
Author_William L. Andrews
black
black autobiography
bondage
Booker T. Washington
Briton Hammon
Category=DNBM1
Category=JBSL
Christian
chronicle
Civil War
colonial
defining
definition
eighteenth century
enslave
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ex-slave
eyewitness
former slave
Frederick Douglass
freedman
freedom
freedperson
freedwoman
genre
George White
goals
Harriet Jacobs
Henry Bibb
Henry Box Brown
history
Jacob D. Green
James A.U. Gronniosaw
James Robert
James W. Pennington
James Watkins
James Williams
Jarena Lee
John Brown
John Jea
John Marrant
Josiah Henson
Leonard Black
Lewis Clarke
literary
literary study
literature
Lunsford Lane
marginality
Martin R. Delany
memoir
Moses Grandy
Moses Roper
narrative
narrator
Nat Turner
nineteenth century
Olaudah Equiano
rhetoric
Richard Allen
Samuel R. Ward
slave narrative
slavery
Solomon Bayley
Solomon Northrup
Venture Smith
whitewashing
William Craft
William Grimes
William Wells Brown
Product details
- ISBN 9780252060335
- Weight: 594g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 1988
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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To Tell A Free Story traces in unprecedented detail the history of Black autobiography from the colonial era through Emancipation. Beginning with the 1760 narrative by Briton Hammond, William L. Andrews explores first-person public writings by Black Americans. Andrews includes but also goes beyond slave narratives to analyze spiritual biographies, criminal confessions, captivity stories, travel accounts, interviews, and memoirs. As he shows, Black writers continuously faced the fact that northern whites often refused to accept their stories and memories as sincere, and especially distrusted portraits of southern whites as inhuman. Black writers had to silence parts of their stories or rely on subversive methods to make facts tellable while contending with the sensibilities of the white editors, publishers, and readers they relied upon and hoped to reach.
William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt,, editor of Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave, and coeditor of Slave Narratives from the Library of America.
