manuscripts and photographs by states and alphabetically by informants
within the states, listing the informants and illustrations, and
collating the contents in seventeen volumes divided into thirty-three
parts. The following material has been omitted: Most of the interviews
with informants born too late to remember anything of significance
regarding slavery or concerned chiefly with folklore; a few negligible
fragments and unidentified manuscripts; a group of Tennessee interviews
showing evidence of plagiarism; and the supplementary material gathered
in connection with the narratives. In the course of the preparation of
these volumes, the Writers' Unit compiled data for an essay on the
narratives and partially completed an index and a glossary. Enough
additional material is being received from the state Writers' Projects,
as part of their surplus, to make a supplement, which, it is hoped, will
contain several states not here represented, such as Louisiana.

All editing had previously been done in the states or the Washington
office. Some of the pencilled comments have been identified as those of
John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, who also read the manuscripts. In a few
cases, two drafts or versions of the same interview have been included
for comparison of interesting variations or alterations.


II

Set beside the work of formal historians, social scientists, and
novelists, slave autobiographies, and contemporary records of
abolitionists and planters, these life histories, taken down as far as
possible in the narrators' words, constitute an invaluable body of
unconscious evidence or indirect source material, which scholars and
writers dealing with the South, especially social psychologists and