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

WINNER OF THE LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY

AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER

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 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 enslaved woman 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 work of African American 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 the Civil War era.

This definitive biography finally tells her full story, revealing:

• A Literary Detective Story: Follow the decade-long investigation that pieced together faint clues from diaries, account books, and census records to solve one of American literature’s biggest mysteries.
• The First Black Female Novelist: Discover the true identity of Hannah Bond “Crafts,” an extraordinarily gifted artist who honed her skills in secret opposition to a system designed to deny her humanity.
• Lost Voices of Slavery: Learn the stories of the five enslaved women whose real experiences of love, friendship, and betrayal were summoned into fiction, rescuing them from being stolen from history.
• Fugitive Slave Narrative: Uncover the history behind The Bondwoman’s Narrative, a manuscript written in hiding after a daring escape from a North Carolina plantation on the eve of the Civil War.

Gregg Hecimovich is a Hutchins Family Fellow at Harvard University and professor of English at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. He received his PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and elsewhere. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Greenville, South Carolina, with his wife and two children.