The slave narrative, a genre the genesis of which can be dated from the early seventeenth century, is primarily associated with the biographical and autobiographical sketches of former North American bondsmen and bondswomen of African descent. This genre reached the height of its popularity in the midnineteenth century with Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , An American Slave (1845) and Booker T. Washington's Up From slavery; An Autobiography (1901). Of these two well-known books, Douglass's carefully constructed autobiography is considered, by such experts as Stephen Butterfield, "the finest example of the slave autobiography as a literary art form." Yet a number of eighteenth-century slave narratives continue to attract critical attention; among these, Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), according to critic Paul Edwards, is "the most remarkable of the 18th century" books by black writers.

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