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Brown, William Wells
African American antislavery lecturer, as well as a groundbreaking novelist, playwright, and historian.Scholars have called William Wells Brown the first African American to achieve distinction in belles lettres, or literature. As a writer Brown's career is made up of “firsts”: he is considered the first African American to publish works in several literary genres. Brown was also known for his political activism, particularly in the antislavery movement, and political themes underscored his writing throughout his career.Brown was born on a plantation outside Lexington, Kentucky, to a white father and a slave mother. He spent most of his childhood and young adulthood as a slave in St. Louis, Missouri, working at a variety of trades, and even traveling to New Orleans, Louisiana, three times as a handyman to a slave trader. Brown became free on New Year's Day 1834, when he was able to slip away from his owners' steamboat while it was docked in Cincinnati, in the free state of Ohio.Brown's middle and last names honored a white Quaker couple, Mr. and Mrs. Wells Brown, who helped him escape. Brown settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where he married Elizabeth Schooner. Next, Brown moved to Buffalo, New York, and spent nine years there working simultaneously as a steamboat worker on Lake Erie and as a conductor for the Underground Railroad, the secret network of individuals who helped fugitive slaves escape to freedom in the Northern states or Canada.In 1843 Brown began lecturing on his experiences in slavery for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, one of many groups promoting Abolitionism in the United States. Brown also became a lecturer on behalf of women's rights and temperance, but it was as a fugitive slave speaking on the evils of slavery that he was best known. This also provided the basis for the beginning of his career as a writer. In the wake of the successful autobiographical Slave Narrative of abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1845, there was an increased demand for similar narratives. Two years later Brown wrote his own—Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself—which went through four U.S. and five British editions in the first three years after its publication.Following the international success of his autobiography, Brown traveled to Europe in 1849. The combination of European demand for his antislavery speeches and the passage of the American Fugitive Slave Law in 1850—which put him in danger of being returned to slavery if he were apprehended anywhere on American soil—led Brown to stay in England for the next five years. From 1849 to 1854 he gave more than a thousand speeches and wrote two books that were important firsts for African American literature. In 1852 Brown published Three Years in Europe; or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met, the first travel book written by an African American. In 1853 he published Clotel; or, the President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, thought by some to be the first novel written by an African American.Although the plot of Clotel is fictional, the book is based on the widespread belief that U.S. President Thomas Jefferson fathered several slave children. The title character, his beautiful mulatto (of African and European descent) daughter, is separated from her mother and sister when all three are sold at auction after Jefferson's death. Her new owner falls in love with her and, after fathering her child, promises to marry her but ultimately betrays his promise and sells her to a dealer. Clotel escapes from the dealer and attempts to free her child, but when she realizes she has been discovered, she drowns herself to avoid being returned to slavery.In later years Clotel has been criticized for its stereotypical portrayal of a “tragic mulatto” and for its melodramatic plot and style. At the time of its publication, however, the novel was praised by antislavery groups for its skill at exposing slavery's horrors, and compared favorably to Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had been a runaway bestseller just a year earlier. Clotel was revised and reprinted three times in the United States during Brown's lifetime. It is still honored as one of the landmark texts in the African American literary tradition and is available in contemporary editions.In 1854 some of Brown's friends raised enough money to purchase his freedom, allowing him to return to the United States. Once home, Brown continued writing on the same themes in a different genre. In 1858 his play The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom became the first Drama published by an African American. Over the next two decades, he focused his efforts on yet another genre: historical works. These included two histories of the black race, another history on blacks and whites in the South, and a rare military history of African Americans in the American Civil War. Brown's career as an orator slowed down after slavery ended, and he eventually settled in Boston and practiced medicine there until his death. As a pioneering black writer, Brown left a lasting legacy to the generations of African American novelists, dramatists, and historians who would follow him.See also Literature, African American; Slavery in the United States.Sign up to recieve email alerts from African American Studies Center
