Situated at the crossroads of African American studies and the history of the book, Fugitive Texts examines the publication, circulation, and reception of antebellum slave narratives. The story of the slave narrative is well rehearsed: narratives of former slaves, critics say, were usually written in collaboration with white abolitionists, with antislavery societies subsidizing publication; they met with considerable success, going through multiple editions and selling in the tens of thousands; they were largely directed toward a northern white audience; they soon emerged as a distinct genre in antebellum America. None of these statements is fundamentally untrue. The overall picture they paint of antebellum slave narratives is, however, a distorted one. Slave narratives were produced through a variety of authorial economies. Investigating these economies allows to shed new light not only on the slave narrative as a genre, but also on African Americans’ print practices at a time when the publishing industry was still emerging and when book trade professionals were reluctant to publish and distribute antislavery literature—at least before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out in 1852. Acknowledging the heterogeneous and fluid nature of what is often perceived as a homogeneous and strictly codified genre gives us a better sense of how the narratives of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and other lesser-known former slaves, might have been variously received and consumed in the decades preceding the Civil War.