William Wells Brown

Who Was William Wells Brown?

William Wells Brown was one of the most prolific and versatile African American writers of the nineteenth century — a former slave who became an abolitionist lecturer, memoirist, novelist, playwright, and historian, and who holds the distinction of being the first African American to publish a novel. Born into slavery in Kentucky, the son of a white slaveholder and an enslaved woman, he escaped to freedom in 1834 with the help of a Quaker named Wells Brown, whose name he adopted in gratitude.

His Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847) went through four editions in its first year, making it one of the most widely read slave narratives of the period. His novel Clotel, or The President’s Daughter (1853), published in London, was the first novel published by an African American — a melodramatic narrative based on the rumored relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved woman Sally Hemings. His plays, his travel writing, and his histories of African American life further established him as one of the most important Black public intellectuals of his era.

Brown’s work is significant for TLA because it uses the available literary forms — the slave narrative, the sentimental novel, the historical account — to make the moral case against slavery with a directness and a personal authority that purely theoretical arguments could not match.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave — 1847
• Clotel, or The President's Daughter — 1853 — first African American novel
• The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom — 1858 — play
• The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements — 1863
• My Southern Home — 1880