The historical and literary importance that slave narratives—the autobiographical accounts written by formerly enslaved people in the United States and throughout the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—wielded in their own time and continue to wield in ours is difficult to overstate. Popular and widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, slave narratives played an indispensable role in the campaigns against slavery in Britain and the United States and in the development of a black literary tradition, and they continue to be widely read and to shape popular understandings and memories of slavery today. "Only By Experience": An Anthology of Slave Narratives collects, in whole or in part, sixteen of the most significant and influential slave narratives. Based on material from the acclaimed Broadview Anthology of British Literature and Broadview Anthology of American Literature, the anthology includes works from the British empire as well as the United States and puts classic examples of the slave narrative genre in conversation with works that raise questions about how the genre is defined. The anthology also features thorough headnotes and annotations for each work, as well as detailed contextual materials for many of the works included.