Reprint of the original, first published in 1845.

Lewis George Clarke published the story of his life as a slave in 1845, after he had escaped from Kentucky and become a well-regarded abolitionist lecturer throughout the North. His book was the first work by a slave to be acquired by the Library of Congress and copyrighted. During the 1840s he lived in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Aaron and Mary Safford, where he encountered Mary's stepsister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, along with Frederick Douglass, Lewis Tappan, Gerrit Smith, Josiah Henson, John Brown, Lydia Child, and Martin Delaney. His experiences are evident in Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, and Stowe identified him as the prototype for the book's rebellious character George Harris. This facsimile edition of Clarke's book is introduced by his great grandson, Carver Clark Gayton, who has served as director of Affirmative Action Programs at the University of Washington; corporate director of educational relations and training for the Boeing Company; lecturer at the Evans School of Public Administration, University of Washington; and executive director of the Northwest African American Museum. He lives in Seattle. A V Ethel Willis White Book

The Blackburns' improbable journey from bondage to freedom pulsates with the breath-catching urgency of a thriller, yet this remarkable story is true . . . An invaluable testament to resistance, resilience, and a once-denied but unalienable right to life and liberty.--Rene Graham, "The Boston Globe."

The Moral Economies of American Authorship argues that the moral character of authors became a kind of literary property within mid-nineteenth-century America's expanding print marketplace, shaping the construction, promotion, and reception of texts as well as of literary reputations. Using a wide range of printed materials--prefaces, dedications, and other paratexts as well as book reviews, advertisements, and editorials that appeared in the era's magazines and newspapers--The Moral Economies of American Authorship recovers and analyzes the circulation of authors' moral currency, attending not only to the marketing of apparently ironclad status but also to the period's not-infrequent author scandals and ensuing attempts at recuperation. These preoccupations prove to be more than a historical curiosity-they prefigure the complex (if often disavowed) interdependence of authorial character and literary value in contemporary scholarship and pedagogy. Combining broad investigations into the marketing and reception of books with case studies that analyze the construction and repair of particular authors' reputations (e.g., James Fenimore Cooper, Mary Prince, Elizabeth Keckley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and E.D.E.N. Southworth), the book constructs a genealogy of the field's investments in and uses of authorial character. In the nineteenth century's deployment of moral character as a signal element in the marketing, reception, and canonization of books and authors, we see how biography both vexed and created literary status, adumbrating our own preoccupations while demonstrating how malleable-and how recuperable-moral authority could be.