So many of our heroes are turned into myths and in this narrative Hannah Crafts humanity is centered. For over 150 years Hannah Crafts manuscript has remained hidden with evidence that Emily Driscoll, a book shop owner in NYC acquired it in 1948 and listed it in her store as: "a fictionalized biography, written in an effusive style, purporting to be the story of the early life and escape of one Hannah Crafts, a mulatto.".Īs a lover of Black literature, I am so grateful that Gregg Hecimovich wrote this book in order to demystify the woman behind what others had reduced to "the mixed-race fugitive author". Gregg Hecimovich is a biographer who committed himself to doing a deep dive into the life of Hannah Crafts in order to piece her story together. who published the first edition of Hannah Crafts handwritten and self-edited manuscript, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts is an exploration of the life and work of this formerly enslaved Black woman who is the first ever known Black, female novelist.
With a foreword written by Henry Louis Gates Jr. By drawing on the lives of those she knew in slavery, Crafts summoned into her fiction people otherwise stolen from history.Īt 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. 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. 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. 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.
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