Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to Donate Rare Manuscript by Female Slave to Yale

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Afro-American Studies, will donate the manuscript of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” by Hannah Crafts, to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at a ceremony on May 30.

The book is thought to be the first novel ever written by an African-American slave, and possibly by a black woman anywhere. The 301-page handwritten, autobiographical text was found at an auction by Gates, who authenticated it, edited it, and had it published in April 2002.

Gates will read from the narrative at the May 30 presentation of the manuscript, which will be held at 11 a.m. at the Beinecke Library, the corner of Wall and High streets.

Yale University President Richard C. Levin; Paul Gilroy, Chair of the African-American Studies Department at Yale; and University Librarian Alice Prochaska will also speak at the event.

A prominent literary scholar and a member of the Yale College Class of 1973, Gates is the Director of the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research and is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. His widely acclaimed books include “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism,” for which he won the American Book Award in 1989, and “Colored People,” a memoir published in 1994. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he has received the National Humanities Award and the MacArthur Prize.

One of the largest buildings in the world devoted entirely to rare books and manuscripts, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses some 500,000 volumes and several million manuscripts. It contains the principal rare books and literary manuscripts of Yale University in the fields of literature, theology, history, and the natural sciences, and serves as a research center for students, faculty and other serious readers.