Brown, William Wells

Brown, William Wells

(born 1814?, near Lexington, Ky., U.S.—died Nov. 6, 1884, Chelsea, Mass.) U.S. writer. Born into slavery, Brown escaped and educated himself, settling in the Boston area. He wrote a popular autobiography, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847), and lectured on abolitionism and temperance reform. Clotel (1853), his only novel, concerning the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and a slave, was the first novel ever published by an African American. His only play, The Escape (1858), is about two slaves who secretly marry.

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Brown, William Wells (b. “William”) (c. 1816–84) reformer, writer; born in Lexington, Ky. After adopting the name of the Wells Brown who assisted his escape from slavery (1834), he became a leading abolitionist, lecturing and writing widely on that and other reform causes. His pioneering works of black fiction and history include his autobiography Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847) and The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867). In 1853 he published in London what was long thought to be the first novel by an African-American, Clotel, or The President's Daughter; it was based on the rumor that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a child with a slave woman; when published in the U.S.A. in 1864 it was delicately retitled, Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States.