The rising abolitionist movement in the United States gave an increasingly strong voice to African American writers. White abolitionists published and distributed autobiographical narratives written by slaves or former slaves. Describing the harsh arid inhuman treatment they had received as slaves, and the difficulties and obstacles encountered during escape, the authors of these narratives spoke out against slavery while presenting white readers with emotionally involving stories that portrayed slaves as human beings deprived of domestic and civil rights. Two of the earliest African American novels emerged from this tradition of autobiographical narrative. After publishing his successful Narrative of William W. Brown in 1847, William Wells Brown experimented with other genres before publishing his first novel, Clotel, in 1853. Another former slave, Frederick Douglass, published the first version of his influential The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845 before serializing his novella The Heroic Slave...