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. 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. 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. 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. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847), was an immediate bestseller, with four editions in its first year. 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.Ī gripping account of his childhood, life in slavery, and eventual escape, Brown’s first published book, Narrative of William W.

This volume, the latest in the American History Through Literature series, is suitable for a variety of undergraduate courses in American history, cultural history, women's studies, and slavery.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. Cashin highlights the most interesting features of this novel and its bold approach to gender and race relations. The plot includes several mulatto characters, such as Clotel, who live on the margins of the black and white worlds, as well as a woman who dresses as a man to escape bondage a white woman who is enslaved and a famous white man who is mistaken for a mulatto. In Clotel, the author focuses on the experiences of a slave woman: Brown treats the themes of gender, race, and slavery in distinctive ways, highlighting the mutability of identity as well as the absurdities and cruelties of slavery. William Wells Brown, a contemporary of Frederick Douglass, was well known for his abolitionist activities. Originally published in 1853, Clotel is the first novel by an African American.