Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Random House has acquired the rights to a nineteenth-century memoir believed to have been written by an African American prisoner, Julie Bosman writes for the New York Times.

Bosman also wrote about the memoir last week when its origins were discovered. Titled The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, or the Inmate of a Gloomy Prison, it was written by Austin Reed, an inmate at Auburn State Prison in upstate New York. It’s believed never to have left the region before a rare books dealer came across it at an estate sale in Rochester.

The 304-page memoir made it to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, where it was authenticated to have been written from the 1830s-1850s. Professor of English Caleb Smith verifies that Reed’s account matches up with historical records of his incarceration at Auburn, with help from archivist and researcher Christine McKay.

It’s not surprising that a publisher leapt at the opportunity to publish The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, considering its historical importance. Nancy Kuhl, a curator at the Beinecke library, says that it “significantly enriches the canon of 19th-century African-American literature and deepens our understanding of all 19th-century America.” And Smith explains that “it’s still a very unusual thing for us to find any previously unknown document from this period by an African-American writer.”

The executive director of the Cayuga Museum of History and Art, Eileen McHugh, tells the Times that conditions for a prisoner like Reed at Auburn would have been “arduous;” the prison become the site of the first execution by electric chair in 1890. This is backed up by Reed’s description of a punishment inflicted at the prison:

Stripping off my shirt the tyrantical curse bounded my hands fast in front of me and orderd me to stand around. Turning my back towards him he threw Sixty seven lashes on me according to the orders of Esq. Cook. I was then to stand over the dreain while one of the inmates wash my back in a pail of salt brine.

Bosman writes that the book is expected to be published in early 2016, with an introduction by Smith and a foreword by David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale.