Prentice Hall Literature--The American Experience

An enslaved woman’s escape reimagines the Underground Railroad as a literal train—and faces America’s brutal history.

In 1873 Cincinnati, escaped slave Sethe is still not free: Sweet Home’s horrors follow her, and the ghost of the baby she killed rather than see returned to bondage takes flesh as a hungry young woman called Beloved. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning novel is Reconstruction historical fiction of slavery’s afterlife—memory, motherhood, and a haunting that will not stay buried.

In 1830 on Faith Plantation in Barbados, eleven-year-old George Washington Black is taken from the cane fields to serve Christopher “Titch” Wilde, who is building a hydrogen balloon he calls the Cloud-cutter—and when a death puts a bounty on Wash, the two cut the tether and flee. Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel is adventure historical fiction of the 1830s, from an enslaved boy’s escape out of Barbados through Virginia, the Arctic, Nova Scotia, London, and Morocco.

In the autumn of 1831, Nat Turner waits in a Southampton County jail to be hanged for the August rising he led, and tells the life that brought him there. William Styron’s 1967 novel is Regency biographical historical fiction of that confession—an enslaved preacher’s life in southeastern Virginia, and the revolt he believed he was called to begin.

In 1867 Lyme Regis, gentleman-paleontologist Charles Smithson is engaged to a proper heiress when he becomes entangled with Sarah Woodruff, the outcast the town calls the French lieutenant’s woman. John Fowles’s novel is Victorian historical fiction that both inhabits a mid-century love story and lets a modern narrator question how such stories end.

A Jamaican woman narrates slavery’s last years and emancipation with wit and steel (Walter Scott Prize 2011).