The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman's Narrative

Named a Most Anticipated Title by: Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post! 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 forward by Henry Louis Gates Jr. In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative , was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author’s identity remained unknown.  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. In this remarkable biography, Hecimovich identifies the novelist as Hannah Bond “Crafts.” 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