She Wrote Her Way to Freedom

The Mystery of America’s First Black Female Novelist: Reviewing ‘The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts’ by Gregg Hecimovich

When the celebrated African American science fiction author Octavia Butler first showed interest in the genre as a young woman, she saw none like herself in the novels she read. “I certainly wasn’t in the science fiction,” she told the New York Times in 2000. “The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-wi…