In this lyrical and novelistic speculative history, Hartman (Lose Your Mother), a Columbia University professor of English and comparative literature, reconstructs the lives of unknown black female urban rebels from the early 20th century, everyday women whose existences are hinted at by court records, social workers' notes, and photographs and who she heralds as "radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live." The photos (taken between 18) inspired the book, and each chapter is anchored by one, around which is woven a vignette about the inner experience of the woman depicted, sometimes zooming out to encompass whole parties or streets or neighborhoods, sometimes intersecting with historical figures of note such as sociologist W.E.B. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. 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.
"Exhilarating…A rich resurrection of a forgotten history." -Parul Sehgal, New York Timesīeautifully 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. Winner of the 2020 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfictionįinalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography Winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
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