Interesting Narrative and Other Writings

Relates the experiences of an African prince who was kidnapped into slavery in 1755 and followed his various masters from the Americas to Europe and through the Caribbean.
Olaudah Equiano's Narrative recounts his kidnapping in Africa at the age of eleven, his service as the slave of an officer in the British Navy, and his years of labor on slave ships until he was able to purchase his freedom in 1766. As a free man on a Central American plantation, he supervised slaves; increasingly disgusted by his co-workers, he returned to England in 1777. In England he worked for the resettlement of blacks in Sierra Leone, married an Englishwoman, and became a leading and respected figure in the anti-slavery movement. An autobiography, a tale of spiritual quest and fulfillment, a sophisticated treatise on religion, politics, and economics.This new revised and expanded edition includes twice the number of previously known published and unpublished works by Equiano.

An exciting and often terrifying adventure story, as well as an important precursor to such famous nineteenth-century slave narratives as Frederick Douglass's autobiographies, Olaudah Equiano's Narrative recounts his kidnapping in Africa at the age of ten, his service as the slave of an officer in the British Navy, his ten years of labor on slave ships until he was able to purchase his freedom in 1766, and his life afterward as a leading and respected figure in the antislavery movement in England. A spirited autobiography, a tale of spiritual quest and fulfillment, and a sophisticated treatise on religion, politics, and economics, The Interesting Narrative is a work of enduring literary and historical value.