About the Author

Harriet Jacobs was an African American writer born February 11th, 1813, in Edenton, North Carolina. She spent a large portion of her life enslaved, which evidently provided the stories for her memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The book was published in 1861 and received initial acclaim in a few favorable reviews, though the start of the war and her publisher declaring bankruptcy quickly doused the marketing flame. Years later, it was rediscovered when progress started to occur within civil rights and an interest developed in female and minority writers. It was later heralded as a classic work. Jacobs passed away in 1897 in Washington, DC.