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William Wells Brown: Clotel & Other Writings

Edited by Ezra Greenspan

A bicentennial edition showcases the extraordinary career of America’s first black novelist

“It is difficult to imagine any one of his contemporaries who contributed as much or as richly to so many genres as did William Wells Brown.”—Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week William Wells Brown, “Ira Aldridge”
December 11, 2020

Interviews How antislavery writings reconnect us with one of the most crucial themes in American literary history
April 13, 2018

Interviews The Escape, first published play by an African American, leaps to the New York City stage
April 13, 2018

Born a slave and kept functionally illiterate until he escaped at age nineteen, William Wells Brown refashioned himself first as an agent of the Underground Railroad and then as an antislavery activist and self-taught orator and author, eventually becoming a foundational figure of African American literature. The Library of America presents the most comprehensive edition of Brown’s writing ever published, an extraordinary collection of landmark works that together give voice to his passionate commitment to freedom and equality.

A gripping account of his childhood, life in slavery, and eventual escape, Brown’s first published book, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847), was an immediate bestseller, with four editions in its first year. Like Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, the only slave autobiography to sell more copies before the Civil War, it unmasks the hypocrisy of Christian slaveholders and exposes with startling intensity the violence of slave life. Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (1853), the first novel written by an African American and Brown’s most ambitious work, purports to be the history of Thomas Jefferson’s black daughters and granddaughters. Dramatizing the victimization of black women under slavery, the novel measures the yawning chasm between America’s founding ideals and the brutal realities of bondage.

Having traveled to Europe in 1849, Brown elected to remain there after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, not returning to America until 1854. The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (1855) is the expanded version of Brown’s pioneering travelogue, recounting his initial trip to Paris as a delegate to the International Peace Congress and his extensive tours through the United Kingdom as an antislavery lecturer. The first published play by an African American, Brown’s The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858) portrays a slave woman’s escape from the sexual aggression of her white master.

Published in the autumn of 1862 as the nation awaited President Lincoln’s final Emancipation Proclamation, The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements highlights black men of accomplishment and influence whose lives “surmounted the many obstacles which slavery and prejudice have thrown in their way.” My Southern Home: or, The South and Its People (1880), Brown’s last memoir, explores the complex relationships and interrelationships between blacks and whites in the South during Reconstruction.

The volume is rounded out with eighteen speeches and letters from Brown’s public career, most previously uncollected, dealing with abolition, party politics, black history, Reconstruction and civil rights, and temperance. Detailed explanatory notes identify Brown’s many quotations and allusions throughout.

Ezra Greenspan holds the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and is professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He is the editor of William Wells Brown: A Reader and the author of William Wells Brown: An African American Life. He is a founding editor of the journal Book History.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week William Wells Brown, “Ira Aldridge”
December 11, 2020

Interviews How antislavery writings reconnect us with one of the most crucial themes in American literary history
April 13, 2018

Interviews The Escape, first published play by an African American, leaps to the New York City stage
April 13, 2018

Interviews Ezra Greenspan on William Wells Brown: “The most rivetingly inventive, entertaining black writer of his era”
April 13, 2018
Table of Contents

Narrative of William W. Brown: A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself

Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter

The American Fugitive in Europe

The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom

The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements

My Southern Home

Speeches & Public Letters
Letter from Wm. W. Brown—A Methodist Deacon’s Prayer, September 26, 1844
A Lecture Delivered before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem at Lyceum Hall, November 14, 1847
Speech at the Royal Public Subscription Rooms, Exeter, England, May 5, 1851
An Appeal to the People of Great Britain and the World, August 1, 1851
Visit of a Fugitive Slave to the Grave of Wilberforce
Speech at Town Hall, Manchester, England, August 1, 1854
Speech at Brick Wesley Church, Philadelphia, October 17, 1854
Speech at Horticultural Hall, West Chester, Pennsylvania, October 23, 1854
Letter from the West, March 31, 1855
Letter from W. W. Brown, April 21, 1855
Speech at Anniversary of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, May 8, 1856
John Brown and the Fugitive Slave Law
Speech at Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, May 9, 1860
Review of Mr. Yancey’s Speech, October 26, 1860
Speech at Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, May 6, 1862
“The Black Man” and Its Critics, July 21, 1863
Speech at Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, May 7, 1867
Dr. Wells Brown on the Colour Question, November 1, 1876

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-291-3 1042 pages

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N° 247 Library of America Series

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