This collection contains: Twelve Years a Slave, Up from Slavery, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, The Life of an American Slave (Fifty Years in Chains), The Experience of Rev. Thomas H. Jones, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and a Slave, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, or, Fifteen Years in Slavery, Thirty Years a Slave, Behind the Scenes: or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, The Life of Josiah Henson, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and His Wife "Vina" After Forty Years of Slavery, Memoir of Pierre Toussaint, The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher, Africa for Christ: Twenty-Eight Years a Slave, and The Narrative of Bethany Veney, a Slave Woman.

The slave narrative is a literary genre involving the autobiographical accounts of enslaved Africans. A slave narrative gives an account of the life, or a portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave. It could be written or orally related by the slave personally. More than 6,000 such narratives are estimated to exist; the overwhelming majority of American slave narratives were authored by African Americans.