Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Library of America eBook Classic

William Wells Brown

Μαρ 2018 · Library of America

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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. His most ambitious work, Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (1853), the first novel written by an African American, 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.

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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 and then as an antislavery activist and self-taught orator and author, eventually becoming a foundational figure of African American literature. His published works include Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847); Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (1853), the first novel written by an African American; The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (1855); and The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), a play.