
The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts
The True Story of The Bondwoman's Narrative
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Narrated by:
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Ron Butler
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Janina Edwards
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By:
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Gregg Hecimovich
About this listen
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
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 foreword 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 direct opposition to a system designed to deny her every measure of humanity. After escaping to New York, the author forged a new identity—as Hannah Crafts—to make sense of a life fractured by slavery.
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. By drawing on the lives of those she knew in slavery, Crafts summoned into her fiction people otherwise stolen from history.
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.
©2023 Gregg Hecimovich (P)2023 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
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eye opening
- By Michael Stansberry on 05-23-18
By: Richard Powers
Writing a fictional autobiography while enslaved
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Great companion piece to 'The Bondwoman's Narrative’, not so much as a standalone
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I don't think the book quite conveys the time it took and the beautiful threads that came together for them to be able to tell this story. I feel thankful for all their work.
Amazing research
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Stunning Research
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