The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writerâ€”recently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholarsâ€”sheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America.

â€œ[A] harrowing [portrait] of life behind bars . . . part confession, part jeremiad, part lamentation, part picaresque novel (reminiscent, at times, of Dickens and Defoe).â€â€”Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

In 2009, scholars at Yale University came across a startling manuscript: the memoir of Austin Reed, a free black man born in the 1820s who spent most of his early life ricocheting between forced labor in prison and forced labor as an indentured servant. Lost for more than one hundred and fifty years, the handwritten document is the first known prison memoir written by an African American. Corroborated by prison records and other documentary sources, Reedâ€™s text gives a gripping first-person account of an antebellum Northern life lived outside slavery that nonetheless bore, in its day-to-day details, unsettling resemblances to that very institution.

Now, for the first time, we can hear Austin Reedâ€™s story as he meant to tell it. He was born to a middle-class black family in the boomtown of Rochester, New York, but when his father died, his mother struggled to make ends meet. Still a child, Reed was placed as an indentured servant to a nearby family of white farmers near Rochester. He was caught attempting to set fire to a building and sentenced to ten years at Manhattanâ€™s brutal House of Refuge, an early juvenile reformatory that would soon become known for beatings and forced labor.

Seven years later, Reed found himself at New Yorkâ€™s infamous Auburn State Prison. It was there that he finished writing this memoir, which explores Americaâ€™s first reformatory and first industrial prison from an inmateâ€™s point of view, recalling the great cruelties and kindnesses he experienced in those places and excavating patterns of racial segregation, exploitation, and bondage that extended beyond the boundaries of the slaveholding South, into free New York.

Accompanied by fascinating historical documents (including a series of poignant letters written by Reed near the end of his life), The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a work of uncommon beauty that tells a story of nineteenth-century racism, violence, labor, and captivity in a proud, defiant voice. Reedâ€™s memoir illuminates his own life and timesâ€”as well as ours today.

Praise for The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

â€œOne of the most fascinating and important memoirs ever produced in the United States.â€â€”Annette Gordon-Reed, The Washington Post

â€œRemarkable . . . triumphantly defiant . . . The bookâ€™s greatest value lies in the gap it fills.â€â€”O: The Oprah Magazine

â€œReed displays virtuosic gifts for narrative that, a century and a half later, earn and hold the readerâ€™s ear.â€â€”Thomas Chatterton Williams, San Francisco Chronicle

â€œ[The bookâ€™s] urgency and relevance remain undiminished. . . . This exemplary edition recovers history without permanently trapping it in one interpretation.â€â€”The Guardian

â€œA sensational, novelistic telling of an eventful life.â€â€”The Paris Review

â€œVivid and painful.â€â€”NPR

â€œLyrical and graceful in one sentence, burning with fury and hellfire in the next.â€â€”Columbus Free Press
Country USA
Brand Modern Library
Manufacturer Random House Publishing Group
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 0812986911_used
Color Black
ReleaseDate 2017-01-24
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780812986914

Country	USA
Brand	Modern Library
Manufacturer	Random House Publishing Group
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	0812986911_used
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	2017-01-24
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780812986914

The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

You might also like...