The Fearless Benjamin Lay

Praise

“Rediker provides a valuable addition to abolitionist historiography. . . . A concise, solid biography of ‘the first revolutionary abolitionist,’ a diminutive man who was decades ahead of his time.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Rediker adroitly describes nuances of the Quaker faith’s evolution. . . . Lay’s farsightedness and extensive advocacy deserves to be remembered.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Highly recommended, especially for public and college library biography collections.”
—Midwest Book Review

“Lay, a lover of books, would have appreciated this one, less for the praise lavished on him than the attention given his message. As Mr. Rediker says, ‘Benjamin’s prophecy speaks to our time.’”
—The Pittsburgh Post–Gazette

“Admirers of Marcus Rediker’s splendid The Slave Ship will be delighted by this historian’s new book. Sailor, pioneer of guerilla theater, and a man who would stop at nothing to make his fellow human beings share his passionate outrage against slavery, Benjamin Lay has long needed a modern biographer worthy of him, and now he has one.”
—Adam Hochschild

“A modern biography of the radical abolitionist Benjamin Lay has long been overdue. With the sure hand of an eminent historian of the disfranchised, Marcus Rediker has brought to life the wide-ranging activism of this extraordinary Quaker, vegetarian dwarf in a richly crafted book. In fully recovering Lay’s revolutionary abolitionist vision, Rediker reveals its ongoing significance for our world.”
—Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition

“The unswerving eighteenth-century abolitionist Benjamin Lay, maligned when not ignored for many generations, has at last found his sympathetic biographer. In this captivating, must-read book, Marcus Rediker shows that Lay’s disfigured body contained a mind of steel and a heart overflowing with compassion for victims of the Atlantic slave trade. Lay’s place in the annals of American reform is now secure. If you’re ready to have your mind changed about received wisdom on the eccentric, lonely early abolitionist who blazed the way for later antislavery stalwarts, read this brilliantly researched and passionately written book.”
—Gary Nash, author of Warner Mifflin, Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist