William Wells Brown: Clotel & Other Writings (LOA #247): Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave / Clotel; or, the President's Daughter / The American Fugitive in Europe / The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom

Born a slave and kept functionally illiterate until he escaped at age nineteen, William Wells Brown (1814–1884) refashioned himself first as an agent of the Underground Railroad, then as an antislavery activist and self-taught orator, and finally as the author of a series of landmark works that made him, like Frederick Douglass, a foundational figure of African American literature. His controversial novel Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (1853), a fictionalized account of the lives an…