How long does it take to read Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments?
Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya V. Hartman takes about 8 hours 30 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 30 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2019. 464 pages, about 127,600 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 14 hours 11 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 30 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 19 minutes |
The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free. These women refused to labour like slaves. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood - all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman deploys both radical scholarship and profound literary intelligence to examine the transformation of intimate life that they instigated. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance.
Subjects: History, Man-woman relationships, Single women, African American Studies, Social conditions, Sociology
