The Bondwoman's Narrative
10 best books like The Bondwoman's Narrative (Hannah Crafts): Clotel: or, The President's Daughter, The House of the Seven Gables, Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, The Street, Nostromo, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Our Nig, Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self: The Givens Collection, The Heroic Slave, The Coquette
| Author | William Wells Brown |
| ISBN | 0142437727 |
First published in December 1853, Clotel was written amid then unconfirmed rumors that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with one of his slaves. The story begins with the auction of his mistress, here called Currer, and their two daughters, Clotel and Althesa. The Virginian who buys Clotel falls...
The House of the Seven Gables
| Author | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| ISBN | 0393924769 |
The sins of one generation are visited upon another in a haunted New England mansion until the arrival of a young woman from the country breathes new air into mouldering lives and rooms. Written shortly after The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables re-addresses the theme of human guilt in a style...
| Author | Charles Brockden Brown |
| ISBN | 0140390790 |
I read WIELAND: OR THE TRANSFORMATION for different reasons than I think the majority will read it. I'll bet a lot of people read it because it's a very early example of the "American Novel". Most are probably assigned it for a class. Perhaps some read it because of interest in a particular aspect (religious...
| Author | Ann Petry |
| ISBN | 0395901499 |
The Street tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was...
| Author | Joseph Conrad |
| ISBN | 0486424529 |
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad’s South American novel reminds me somehow of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, perhaps the setting of mines in South America.
The underlying political ideologies are also reminiscent to some extent on Rand’s objectivism, and both author’s guileless mistrust...
Narrative of Sojourner Truth
One of the most famous and admired African-American women in U.S. history, Sojourner Truth sang, preached, and debated at camp meetings across the country, led by her devotion to the antislavery movement and her ardent pursuit of women's rights. Born into slavery in 1797, Truth fled from bondage some...
| 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 | Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins |
| ISBN | 0743467698 |
Of One Blood is the last of four novels written by Pauline Hopkins. She is considered by some to be "the most prolific African-American woman writer and the most influential literary editor of the first decade of the twentieth century, though she is one of the lesser known literary figures of the much...
| Author | Frederick Douglass |
| ISBN | 1604592362 |
The Heroic Slave was Frederick Douglass' only piece of fiction. He wrote it in response to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society's request for a submission to be included in their anthology Autographs for Freedom. The Heroic Slave is a retelling of an actual rebellion led by Madison Washington...
| Author | Hannah Webster Foster |
| ISBN | 0195042395 |
The Coquette tells the much-publicized story of the seduction and death of Elizabeth Whitman, a poet from Hartford, Connecticut.
Written as a series of letters--between the heroine and her friends and lovers--it describes her long, tortuous courtship by two men, neither of whom perfectly...
