biography
| name: |
Brown, William Wells
|
| |
originally William
|
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (c.1816–84)
|
| biography:
| Reformer and writer, born in Lexington, Kentucky, USA. 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, based on the rumour that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a child with a slave woman. When published in the USA in 1864 it was delicately retitled, Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States. |
|
|
