The Life And The Adventures Of A Haunted Convict

The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writerùrecently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholarsùsheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America. ô[A] harrowing [portrait] of life behind bars . . . part confession, part jeremiad, part lamentation, part picaresque novel (reminiscent, at times, of Dickens and Defoe).öùMichiko 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, ReedÆs 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 ReedÆs 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 ManhattanÆs 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 YorkÆs infamous Auburn State Prison. It was there that he finished writing this memoir, which explores AmericaÆs first reformatory and first industrial prison from an inmateÆs 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 Accompanied by fascinating historical documents (including a series of poignant letters written by Reed near the end of his life), The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a work of uncommon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. ReedÆs memoir illuminates his own life and timesùas well as ours today. Praise for The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict ôOne of the most fascinating and important memoirs ever produced in the United States.öùAnnette Gordon-Reed, The Washington Post ôRemarkable . . . triumphantly defiant . . . The bookÆs greatest value lies in the gap it fills.öùO: The Oprah Magazine ôReed displays virtuosic gifts for narrative that, a century and a half later, earn and hold the readerÆs ear.öùThomas Chatterton Williams, San Francisco Chronicle ô[The bookÆs] urgency and relevance remain undiminished. . . . This exemplary edition recovers history without permanently trapping it in one interpretation.öùThe Guardian ôA sensational, novelistic telling of an eventful life.öùThe Paris Review ôVivid and painful.öùNPR ôLyrical and graceful in one sentence, burning with fury and hellfire in the next.öùColumbus Free Press

• | Author: Austin Reed
• | Publisher: Modern Library
• | Publication Date: Jan 24, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 352 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback/Biography & Autobiography
• | ISBN-10: 0812986911
• | ISBN-13: 9780812986914