Bøker av William Wells Brown

The first novel by an African-American, this dramatic tale describes the fate of a child fathered by Thomas Jefferson with one of his slaves. Although born into slavery, the author escaped bondage to become a prominent reformer and historian. An emotionally powerful depiction of slavery, racial conflict in the antebellum South.

"The Black man: his antecedents, his genius, and his achievements was originally published in 1865"--Title page verso.

As nearly all of its reviewers pointed out, Clotel was an audience-minded performance, an effort to capitalize on the post--Uncle Tom's Cabin "mania" for abolitionist fiction in Great Britain, where William Wells Brown lived between 1849 and 1854. The novel tells the story of Clotel and Althesa, the fictional daughters of Thomas Jefferson and his mixed-race slave. Like the popular and entertaining public lectures that Brown gave in England and America, Clotel is a series of startling, attention-grabbing narrative "attractions." Brown creates in this novel a delivery system for these attractions in an effort to draw as many readers as possible toward anti-slavery and anti-racist causes. Rough, studded with caricatures, and intimate with the racism it ironizes, Clotel is still capable of creating a potent mix of discomfort and delight. This edition aims to make it possible to read Clotel in something like its original cultural context. Geoffrey Sanborn's Introduction discusses Brown's extensive plagiarism of other authors in composing Clotel, as well as his narrative strategies within the novel itself. Appendices include material on slave auctions, contemporary attractions and amusements, and the topic of plagiarism more broadly.

William Wells Brown (1814?-84) was uncertain of his own birthday because he was born a slave, near Lexington, Kentucky. He managed to escape to Ohio, a free state, in 1834. Obtaining work on steamboats, he assisted many other slaves to escape across Lake Erie to Canada. In 1849, having achieved prominence in the American anti-slavery movement, he left for Europe, both to lecture against slavery and also to gain an education for his daughters. He stayed in Europe until 1854, since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had made it possible that he could be taken back into slavery if he returned. Meanwhile, he had begun to write both fiction and non-fiction, and this account of his travels in Europe, prefaced by a short biography, was published in 1852. Brown was able to return to the United States in 1854, when British friends paid for his freedom.

Originally published in 1853, "Clotel" is one of the first novels by an African American. In it, 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.

In 1863, as the Civil War raged, the escaped slave, abolitionist, and novelist William Wells Brown identified two groups most harmful to his race. "The first and most relentless," he explained, "are those who have done them the greatest injury, by being instrumental in their enslavement and consequent degradation.