Life in the Iron Mills

Author	Olaudah Equiano
ISBN	0312442033

Widely admired for its vivid accounts of the slave trade, Olaudah Equiano's autobiography -- the first slave narrative to attract a significant readership -- reveals many aspects of the eighteenth-century Western world through the experiences of one individual. The second edition reproduces...

Author	Theodore Dreiser
ISBN	0393960420

When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.'

The tale of Carrie Meeber's rise to stardom in the theatre and George Hurstwood's slow decline...

Author	Nathaniel Hawthorne
ISBN	1557423628

Such a wonderfully (and eerily) subversive story of a man who sees what lies behind the virtuous facade. A classic "dark romance," it's got all the hallmarks of another kind of classic: that of the "hero cycle" (to use Joseph Campbell's famous phrase), where the hero has to leave society to gain wisdom,...

Author	Harriet E. Wilson
ISBN	0142437778

Our Nig is the tale of a mixed-race girl, Frado, abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father. Frado becomes the servant of the Bellmonts, a lower-middle-class white family in the free North, while slavery is still legal in the South, and suffers numerous abuses in their household....

Author	Gayl Jones
ISBN	0807063150

Here is Gayl Jones's classic novel, the tale of blues singer Ursa, consumed by her hatred of the nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both her grandmother and mother.

From the back cover: "History and fiction have yielded little about those black slave women who were mistress and...

Author	Susanna Rowson
ISBN	0195042387

Charlotte Temple, a "best seller" that went through more than 200 editions, was the most popular American novel until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. It tells of a beautiful English girl who at the age of 15 is courted by and runs away with a British lieutenant named Montraville. Once in America,...