Master Slave Husband Wife
By Ilyon Woo
- Genre
- Biography, Memoir & Autobiography
- Publisher
- Simon & Schuster
- Publication year
- 2023
- ISBN
- 9781501191053
Master Slave Husband Wife is a work of narrative history by Ilyon Woo, published by Simon & Schuster in January 2023. It recounts the 1848 escape of Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved couple who fled Georgia disguised as a white master and his servant. It won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
In 1848 an enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, escaped from Georgia in plain sight: the light-skinned Ellen disguised as an ailing white gentleman, William posing as her manservant. Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife tells their astonishing journey with the pace of a thriller and the rigor of deep archival history. Woo reconstructs the improvisation, terror and tenderness of a plan that depended on performing the very hierarchies the Crafts were fleeing. intendle recommends it as narrative nonfiction at its finest - a true story of ingenuity and love that also illuminates abolitionism, gender and the machinery of American slavery. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and named among the year's ten best books by The New York Times, it turns meticulous research into something genuinely gripping. History rarely reads with this much momentum.