The Great Escapes: Four Slave Narratives (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Daphne A. Brooks and Jeffrey Gonda

The Great Escapes: Four Slave Narratives is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

Collected in this volume are four published slave narratives of daring escapes to freedom. William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom (1860), tells the story of the couple reaching freedom in 1848 by travelling openly by train—with Ellen Craft posing as a white male planter and William as her servant. This is followed by two versions of Henry “Box” Brown’s escape by mailing himself to Philadelphia in 1849—Narrative of Henry “Box” Brown, published that same year in America and Narrative of the Life of Henry “Box” Brown, published in 1851 in Britain. Finally, William Wells Brown’s Narrative of William Wells Brown (1847), tells of the young man’s surreptitious exit from a steamboat docked in Ohio, a free state, in 1834.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411432253

Reviews for The Great Escapes

[histreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I would more be apt to call this book The Great Escapes 3 1/2 Slave Narratives. The differences between Narrative of Henry Box Brown and Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown is negligible. Nevertheless, all three authors write compelling stories and offer political notions of freedom, as applicable today just as they were in the 19th century.