The view that slavery could best be described by those who had
themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several
thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with
those who "endured." Although most of these accounts appeared before the
Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts
of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration
(WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of
these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of
autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of
the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in
seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of
more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them
first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions
to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled
opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the "peculiar
institution," to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a
slave in the United States. --Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library
of Congress This paperback edition of all of the Tennessee narratives is
reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers,
just as they were originally typed.
