To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865

by William L. Andrews

To Tell A Free Story traces in unprecedented detail the history of Black autobiography from the colonial era through Emancipation. Beginning with the 1760 narrative by Briton Hammond, William L. Andrews explores first-person public writings by Black Americans. Andrews includes but also goes beyond slave narratives to analyze spiritual biographies, criminal confessions, captivity stories, travel accounts, interviews, and memoirs. As he shows, Black writers continuously faced the fact that northern whites often refused to accept their stories and memories as sincere, and especially distrusted portraits of southern whites as inhuman. Black writers had to silence parts of their stories or rely on subversive methods to make facts tellable while contending with the sensibilities of the white editors, publishers, and readers they relied upon and hoped to reach.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, African American

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

William Leake Andrews (1948-) is an American Professor Emeritus of English at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a scholar of early African-American literature. Wikipedia

Reviews

[Shanae · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Andrews's To Tell a Free Story is the perfect book for students studying what some consider the beginnings of African American literature - the African American autobiography. The book is well-written and provided the perfect analysis of literature I needed to get through a graduate course on African American autobiography. Nonetheless, I totally recommend this book to anyone interested in African American literature and its origins.

[Sarah]

The last couple of chapters are pretty terrific - especially his discussion of Jacobs and Douglass. The first 150 and so pages are jammed with jargon and sleep-inducing. Important points and insight, but difficult reading.

[Janel Atlas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lit and historical criticism of first 100 years of African American autobiographical narratives.