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A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr.In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, The Bondwoman's Narrative, was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author's identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Professor Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author's name and, in The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, hefinally tells her story.In this remarkable biography, Hecimovich identifies the novelist as Hannah Bond "Crafts.