Born a slave, William Wells Brown (1815-1884) escaped to freedom and became the first African American to publish a novel or a play. He was also an abolitionist and an internationally acclaimed lectur...
Read more
William Wells Brown (1813-6 November 1884), historian, abolitionist, reformer, and first black American novelist, was born on a plantation near Lexington, Kentucky, to a slave mother and a white slave...
Read more
In a letter dated 2 July 1847, Edmund Quincy, a prominent Boston abolitionist, described the thirty-three-year-old William Wells Brown as "an extraordinary fellow. I do not know that his intellectua...
Read more
William Wells Brown's chillingly realistic depictions of the horrors of slavery make him an important figure in American literature. Despite his wretched beginnings in bondage he rose to become the fi...
Read more
Born a slave and lacking any formal education, William Wells Brown occupies a central and remarkably versatile role in the formation of the African American literary tradition. The author of the first...
Read more