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 slaveholding father. In spite of his mean beginnings, Brown became a prominent member of his race, as well as a prolific writer, producing, until his death in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a number of significant historical, sociological, and creative works.

As a slave, young William was often "hired out" by his various masters, a practice which afforded him the opportunity to expand the limited horizons normally imposed upon a victim of the South's "peculiar institution." In 1830, after several years working in hotels and on the steamboats which crowded America's lakes and rivers, he had the good fortune to find himself working for Elijah P. Lovejoy, the abolitionist newspaperman who was fated to be murdered by a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois, in...