Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House

"I have often been asked to write my life . . . it has been an eventful one," wrote Elizabeth Keckley in her autobiography Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. First published in 1868, it is one of the most candid and poignant slave narratives. It also looks beyond Emancipation and is, in the words of historian William L. Andrews, "the first major text to represent the interests and aims of this nascent African American leadership class in the post...