William Wells Brown: Clotel & Other Writings (LOA #247)

A showcase of the extraordinary career America’s first Black novelist and pivotal figure in African American literature “It is difficult to imagine any one of his contemporaries who contributed as much or as richly to so many genres.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr. 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, an