Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments reconstructs the lives of young Black women in Philadelphia and New York in the early twentieth century who created new ways of living, loving, and being. Hartman, a literary scholar and cultural historian, works against the grain of historical archives that documented these women primarily through arrest records, social work files, and reformatory registries. She refuses to accept the pathologizing narratives these sources impose, instead reading for agency, joy, and creative invention. The women she profiles practiced 'free love,' formed queer partnerships, supported themselves through sex work and domestic labor, and created communities that defied bourgeois respectability. Hartman's method is speculative and literary; she fills archival silences with imaginative reconstruction, asking what these women might have felt and dreamed. The book is illustrated with photographs from the period that Hartman reads for submerged narratives. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is both historical recovery and theoretical intervention, arguing for the value of the unarchived life and for a Black feminist genealogy of freedom. Essential reading for anyone interested in African American history, urban history, queer history, or the possibilities of historical writing.