Making Crooked Paths Straight: Crossroads and Conversion in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by HImself (1789)

The premise of Making Crooked Paths Straight is that Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself (1789) is more than unadorned prose written by a simple minded former enslaved African who, in the end, desired to emulate the ways of his former English enslavers, obfuscate his identity, and merely be a financially successful bookseller and businessman. Throughout this study, Samuels argues and supports the idea that, first and foremost, Equiano is a master masker, a trickster hero determined to protect his fairly well-mapped sense of self that is deeply rooted in the conceptual metaphor which he selects as his central metaphor of self for his life: African Man is warrior!"