The life and the adventures of a haunted convict
By: Austin Reed ; edited and with an introduction by Caleb Smith ; foreword by David W. Blight and Robert B. Stepto
Contributors: Smith, Caleb, 1977- editor, writer of introduction
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 270
ISBN-13: 9780812997095
Subjects: Race relations; Prisons; Reformatories; Social conditions; History; African Americans; Biography; African American prisoners
Description: "The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a rare and original autobiography, a first-person account of a young black man's life as an indentured servant, a juvenile delinquent, and a prisoner in New York State in the mid-nineteenth century. Austin Reed was born a free man near Rochester, NY in the 1820s. As a young adult, he was sent to a juvenile reform school in Manhattan, where he learned to read and write. In the decades that followed, Reed would be repeatedly incarcerated for theft in a state prison in Auburn. It was there that he began to write this memoir, which explores America's first reformatory and first industrial prison from an inmate's point of view, and the great cruelties and kindnesses he experienced in those places, excavating patterns of racial segregation, exploitation, and bondage extending beyond the boundaries of the slaveholding South, into free New York. A work of uncommon, haunting beauty, this is a major historical document that transforms our understanding of nineteenth-century history and literature"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.