The life and the adventures of a haunted convict

Resource Information

The work The life and the adventures of a haunted convict represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Manchester City Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The life and the adventures of a haunted convict

Statement of responsibility

Austin Reed ; edited and with an introduction by Caleb Smith ; foreword by David W. Blight and Robert B. Stepto

Creator

• Reed, Austin, 1823?-

Contributor

• Smith, Caleb, 1977-

Author

• Reed, Austin, 1823?-

Editor

• Smith, Caleb, 1977-

Writer of introduction

• Smith, Caleb, 1977-

Subject

• Autobiographies
• Prisons -- New York (State) -- History -- 19th century
• Reed, Austin, 1823?-
• Reformatories -- New York (State) -- History -- 19th century
• United States -- Race relations | History -- 19th century
• United States -- Social conditions -- 19th century
• African American prisoners -- New York (State) -- Biography
• African Americans -- Biography

Genre

• Biography
• Autobiographies

Language

eng

Summary

"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 A work of uncommon, haunting beauty, this is a major historical document that transforms our understanding of nineteenth-century history and literature"--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Biography type

autobiography

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

• 365/.34
• B

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

no index present

LC call number

HV9468.R44

LC item number

A3 2016

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography