Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

"I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved.…[Hartman's] mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details.", "Revelatory.… Wayward Lives is thrilling to read because it invents a genre as deft and adventurous as the lives it chronicles.", "Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed.", "Kaleidoscopic.… In granting these forgotten women a voice, and conjuring their longing for freedom, Hartman resists the century-long diminution of their lives to social problems.… The result is an effect more usually associated with fiction than history, of inspiring a powerful imaginative empathy—not only towards characters in the distant past but towards the strangers all around us, whose humanity we share.", "Genre-bending literary history.… These are dishy, illuminating, and heartbreaking stories about the knotted relationship between desire and freedom."

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother, Scenes of Subjection. She has been a MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.