The People History Left Out.
Now Telling Their Own Stories.
A YA historical fiction series that puts real, overlooked historical figures at the center of their own stories — researched deep, written to read like a novel, not a syllabus.
History Got Written Around Them. I’m Writing Them Back In.
The names in this series rarely made it past a single paragraph in a textbook, if they made it in at all. Larger Than Life takes real people — Martin Delany, Robert Smalls, Ida B. Wells, and others — and gives them what history didn’t: a full story, told from the inside.
Every book is built on real research, brought to life through narrative fiction for both younger readers and adults alike. This is Unique Coloring’s flagship series — the answer to what it means to color history back in.
Book One—The Legend of Martin Delany
Coming January 31, 2027 — Pre-Order Now
Not every hero leads. Some just make you brave enough to follow.
Martin Delany never set out to be a legend — a newspaper editor alongside Frederick Douglass, a survivor of a cholera epidemic no one else would walk into, a man who told a superior officer that formerly enslaved families had a right to the land they'd worked their whole lives. Told sideways, through four ordinary people changed by him at four turning points in American history.
Book One—The Legend of Robert Smalls
Coming June, 2027 — Pre-Order Soon
Freedom wasn’t handed to him. He commandeered it.
Robert Smalls never set out to be a legend — a hired-out teenager on a Charleston dock who memorized a harbor by feel, a man who steered a stolen Confederate steamer past four armed checkpoints in the dark with his own family hidden below, and who spent the rest of his life proving that being right didn’t always require being loud about it. Told sideways, through three ordinary people who each crossed his path at a different turning point in his life.
Book One—The Legend of Ida B. Wells
Coming Next
She never asked permission to tell the truth.
Ida B. Wells never set out to be a legend — a woman who kept her seat on a train when a conductor decided her paid ticket didn’t count, a teacher who told her own students the difference between an easy answer and a true one, a journalist who walked straight into the story white Memphis was most desperate to have told a different way. Told sideways, through four ordinary people who each crossed her path at a different turning point in her life.
Series note:
Larger Than Life is a planned ten-volume series, each book built around a different, underserved figure in Black history. Book One publishes January 2027. Book Two is complete. Book Three is in progress.
What Makes Larger Than Life Different
Each book tells its subject’s story sideways — through the invented people who stood near enough to be changed by them. The narrators are fiction. The history that shapes them isn’t. Every volume begins with primary and secondary sources carefully vetted before a single scene is written, because getting the history right matters, even in a work of fiction built around it.
Each book is a standalone historical novella, sized for the shelf, the classroom, or the library cart — 150 pages, trade paperback, ages 14+ (grades 9–12), also recommended for adult readers of historical fiction.
About Daniel J. Middleton
Daniel J. Middleton is an independent historian, author, and illustrator based in Oswego, New York. After two decades working across the book publishing industry — as a designer, editor, and advisor to small presses and independent authors — he founded Unique Coloring to correct something he’d watched go unaddressed for too long: how rarely Black history and the Black experience were given the research, care, and authentic representation they deserved on the page.
That same standard shapes every book in the Larger Than Life series. Each volume begins with primary and secondary sources carefully vetted before a single scene is written.
