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 Bondwomans Narrative, was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the authors identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Professor Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the authors name and, in The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, he finally tells her story.In this remarkable biography, Hecimovich identifies the novelist as Hannah Bond Crafts. She was not only the first known Black woman to compose a novel but also an extraordinarily gifted artist who honed her literary skills in direct opposition to a system designed to deny her every measure of humanity. After escaping to New York, the author forged a new identityas Hannah Craftsto make sense of a life fractured by slavery.Hecimovich establishes the case for authorship of The Bondwomans Narrative by examining the lives of Hannah Craftss friends and contemporaries, including the five enslaved women whose experiences form part of her narrative. By drawing on the lives of those she knew in slavery, Crafts summoned into her fiction people otherwise stolen from history.At once a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts discovers a tale of love, friendship, betrayal, and violence set against the backdrop of Americas slide into Civil War.