Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Paul Jefferson

Critical Essay by Paul Jefferson

SOURCE: An introduction to The Travels of William Wells Brown, Markus Wiener Publishing, 1991, pp. 1-20.

In the following essay, Jefferson contextualizes Brown's literary accomplishments by providing background information on his life.

I

William Wells Brown, the black nineteenth-century man of letters, is best known for the Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave (Boston, 1847), a once popular and now classic autobiography;¹ Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (London, 1853), the first novel published by an African-American;² and several works of history, among them The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (Boston, 1873), the most important book by a black historian until George Washington Williams' History of the Negro Race in America, 1619-1880 (New York, 1883). Brown's other writings include a compilation of anti-slavery songs, published lectures, a five-act play, and English and American editions of the first travel sketches published by a black American.