On November 6, 1884, William Wells Brown died in Chelsea, Massachusetts.įirst published in London, Clotel or, The President's Daughter (1853) subsequently underwent three title changes and substantial revisions for later editions, all released during the 1860s. As a professional writer, Brown produced a range of works, including the first African American play, The Escape or, a Leap for Freedom (1858), two volumes of African American history, three additional versions of Clotel, and a final autobiography, My Southern Home or, the South and Its People (1880). A year later, Clotel or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, widely recognized as the first African American novel, was published. While in England, he published a travel narrative, Three Years in Europe or, Places I have Seen and People I Have Met (1852). Brown later spent several years abroad, attending a peace conference in Paris lecturing for England's antislavery movement.

With its four American and five British editions appearing before 1850, Brown's Narrative, second in popularity only to Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, brought him international celebrity. In that same year, he wrote and published his autobiography, the Narrative of William W. For the next nine years, Brown worked aboard a Lake Erie steamboat while concurrently acting as an Underground Railroad conductor in Buffalo, New York.Įmbarking on a career as a lecturing agent for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1843, Brown eventually moved to Boston in 1847, where he began his impressive literary career. Aided in his flight from Ohio into Canada by the Quaker Wells Brown, William adopted the man's names out of gratitude and admiration. After at least two failed attempts, Brown did escape slavery on New Year's Day, 1834. William worked as a house servant and field slave and was hired out as an assistant to a tavern keeper, a printer, and the slave trader James Walker, who voyaged extensively, traveling to and from the New Orleans slave market on the Mississippi River. Louis, Missouri until the age of twenty, Brown was exposed to and experienced slavery amid remarkably wide-ranging conditions.

Born on a plantation near Lexington, Kentucky, in 1814, William Wells Brown was the son of a white man and an enslaved woman.

Clotel by william wells brown