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 first African American novelist, playwright, and travel writer. The diversity of his talents as autobiographer, historian, writer, explorer, doctor, entrepreneur, sociologist, and orator for abolitionism and temperance are all the more remarkable for his being self-educated.

Brown was born a slave in the vicinity of Lexington, Kentucky, around 1814. His mother, Elizabeth, was a slave, and his father, George Higgins, was a slaveholder and a near relation of his first master, Dr. John Young. A member of the old Southern aristocratic Wickliffe family, Young was a wealthy plantation owner and cultivator of tobacco, hemp, flax, and feed corn. Although Young usually recorded the dates of birth of his slaves, there exists no such record for Brown. Biographer L. H...