Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974. Survey of black autobiography from the slave narratives to modern times. Includes detailed descriptions of the most important autobiographies, including those of Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and George Jackson.

Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Slave's Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. A useful collection of critical works on the slave narratives as literature and history, written by notable scholars.

Includes a chronological list of all published narratives and a bibliography.

Huggins, Nathan I. Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience. Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Collection of essays by prominent Afro-American scholars. Particularly interesting are the essays in Chapter 3, including "The Daily Life of Southern Slaves" and "The Social Consequences of Slavery."

Mannix, Daniel P., and Malcolm Cowley.

Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-...