A rare and original autobiography, a first-person account of a young black man's life as an indentured servant, a juvenile delinquent, and a prisoner in New York State in the mid-nineteenth century. Austin Reed was born a free man near Rochester, NY in the 1820s. As a young adult, he was sent to a juvenile reform school in Manhattan, where he learned to read and write. In the decades that followed, Reed would be repeatedly incarcerated in a state prison in Auburn. It was there that he began to write this memoir, which explores America's first industrial prison from an inmate's point of view, and the great cruelties and kindnesses he experienced in those places, excavating patterns of racial segregation, exploitation, and bondage.

Author Biography

AUSTIN REED (1827-unknown) was born in Rochester, NY. His memoir was written around 1858-59, when he was still incarcerated. Editor CALEB SMITH is professor of English and American Studies at Yale University and the author of The Oracle and the Curse and The Prison and the American Imagination.