Captivity Narrative of Hannah Duston

Indian captivity narratives were popular reading in this country before the vanishing of the frontier, and they are one of the earliest forms of American literature. The brief and bloody chronicle of Hannah Duston from 1697 may be the most enduring. It was told and retold for over a hundred and fifty years by authors of literary distinction and continues to trouble us with its moral quandary. This project was conceived and editorially developed at Arion Press. It assembles together for the first time the accounts of the murder of her Indian captors by the white colonist Hannah Duston, as told by Mather, Whittier, Hawthorne and Thoreau. Richard Bosman created images of arresting moments from this dark drama in his woodcuts that appear on each page of the four narrations, giving a parallel visual interpretation throughout the book.