The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, is the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, an African from what is now Nigeria who was enslaved in childhood and eventually earned his freedom and became an abolitionist in the United Kingdom. In the mid 1700s, around the age of eleven, Olaudah Equiano and his sister were kidnapped from their village in equatorial Africa and sold to slavers. Within a year he was aboard a European slave ship on his way to the Caribbean. The narrative is argued to represent a variety of styles, such as a slavery narrative, travel narrative, and spiritual narrative. The book describes Equiano's time spent in enslavement, and keeps track of his attempts at becoming an independent man through his study of the Bible, and his success in the end in gaining his own freedom and in business thereafter. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was one of the first popular slave narratives, it remains an important literary work in its own right.