About this item
Real-life accounts of the world's most notorious pirates - both men and women, from the Golden Age of Piracy and beyond - compiled by the New York Times bestselling author of A True Account: Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself. A Penguin Classic. Spanning three centuries and eight thousand nautical miles, and compiled by a direct descendant of a sailor who waged war with pirates in the early nineteenth century, The Penguin Book of Pirates takes us behind the eye patches, the peg legs, and the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger and into the no-man's-land of piracy that is rife with paradoxes and plot twists. Here, in a fascinating array of accounts that include trial transcripts, journalism, ship logs, and more, are the grit and patois of real maritime marauders like the infamous Blackbeard; the pirates who inspired Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean,Stede Bonnet in Max's Our Flag Means Death, and the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride; the astoundingly egalitarian multi-ethnic and multilingual crews that became enmeshed in historical horrors like the slave trade; and lesser-known but no less formidable women pirates, many of whom disguised themselves as men.
About the Author
Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning writer of historical fiction. Her best known books are The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2009 and was named one of USA Today's top tend books of the year, and Conversion, which received the 2015 Massachusetts Book Award in young adult literature. In 2014 she edited The Penguin Book of Witches for Penguin Classics, a primary source reader on the history of witchcraft in England and North America. The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, her latest novel for adults, was published by Henry Holt and Co in summer 2019. Her next project is The Vanderbilts: an American Dynasty, a popular history co-authored with CNN's Anderson Cooper, coming from Harper in fall 2021. She has appeared on "Good Morning America," "CBS This Morning," NPR's "Weekend Edition," the BBC, the History Channel, and the Travel Channel, and she hosted "Salem: Unmasking the Devil" for National Geographic. Her fiction has been translated into over twenty languages. She holds a BA in art history and philosophy from Columbia and an MA in American and New England studies from Boston University, and she has taught American history, visual culture, and writing at BU and Cornell. A native Houstonian, she lives in New England and New York City with her family, where she is at work on her next novel. She also puts hot sauce on everything.
