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.

The autobiographical narratives of black ex-slaves published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute the largest body of literature produced by slaves in human history. Black slaves in the New World created a veritable "literature of escape" depicting the overwhelming horrors of human bondage. These narratives served the abolitionist movement not only as evidence of the slaves' degradation but also of their "intellectual capacity." Accordingly, this literature has elicited a wealth of analysis- and controversy- from its initial publication right up to our day. This volume charts the response to the black slave's narrative from 1750 to the present. The book consists of three sections: selected reviews of slave narratives, dating from 1750 to 1861; essays examining how such narratives serve as historical material; and essays exploring the narratives as literary artifacts.