The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts

The True Story of The Bondwoman's Narrative

Gregg Hecimovich

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780062334732
• eBook ISBN: 9780062334756
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Beginnings
• Chapter 2: The Search
• Chapter 3: Nat Turner, the Wheelers, and the Bondwoman’s Narrative
• Chapter 4: The Revolt
• Chapter 5: The Candidates
• Chapter 6: Childhood
• Chapter 7: Property
• Chapter 8: Rosea Pugh and Hannah Sr.
• Chapter 9: The Early Life of Hannah Crafts
• Chapter 10: The Bondwoman’s Narrative and Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Chapter 11: The Notebook
• Chapter 12: Religion
• Chapter 13: The Wheelers
• Chapter 14: The Novel
• Chapter 15: The Life and Times of Eliza Morgan
• Chapter 16: The Bondwoman’s Narrative and Bleak House
• Chapter 17: The Search Continued
• Chapter 18: The Life and Times of Jane Johnson
• Chapter 19: The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts
• Chapter 20: The Life and Times of Hannah Vincent
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Gregg Hecimovich
• Copyright
• About the Publisher