A showcase of the extraordinary career America's** first Black
novelist and pivotal figure in African American literature: "It is
difficult to imagine any one of his contemporaries who contributed as
much or as richly to so many genres" (Henry Louis Gates Jr.)**
Born a slave and kept functionally illiterate until he escaped at age
nineteen, William Wells Brown (1814-1884) refashioned himself first as
an agent of the Underground Railroad, then as an antislavery activist
and self-taught orator, and finally as the author of a series of
landmark works that made him, like Frederick Douglass, a foundational
figure of African American literature. His controversial novel Clotel;
or, the President's Daughter (1853), a fictionalized account of the
lives and struggles of Thomas Jefferson's black daughters and
granddaughters, is the first novel written by an African American.
This Library of America volume brings it together with Brown's other
groundbreaking works: Narrative of William W. Brown: A Fugitive Slave,
Written by Himself (1847), his first published book and an immediate
bestseller, which describes his childhood, life in slavery, and eventual
escape; later memoirs charting his life during the Civil War and
Reconstruction; the first play (The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom,
1858), travelogue (The American Fugitive in Europe, 1855), and history
(The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements,
1862) written by an African American; and eighteen speeches and public
letters from the 1840s, 50s, and 60s, many collected here for the first
time.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in
length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are
printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
