author
Emma Langdon Roche
1878–1945
A Mobile, Alabama writer and artist, she is remembered for vivid regional history and for early published interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, a survivor of the Clotilda. Her work opens a window onto the American South through both storytelling and firsthand testimony.
1 Audiobook
Historical sketches of the south
by Emma Langdon Roche
About the author
Born in Mobile, Alabama, on March 26, 1878, Emma Langdon Roche was an American writer and artist whose work ranged across local history, nature, and illustration. She is best known for Historic Sketches of the South (1914), a book that helped preserve stories, people, and places from the Gulf South.
Roche also holds an important place in historical writing because she was the first author to publish a book based on interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, also known as Kazoola, a survivor of the Middle Passage and the last known slave ship, the Clotilda. That connection has made her writing especially valuable to later readers interested in memory, oral history, and the lives too often left out of official records.
She once described herself as an "artist, writer, housekeeper and farmer," a fitting snapshot of a wide-ranging life. Roche died on April 5, 1945, but her work continues to draw attention for the way it links Southern history with personal voices and careful observation.