William Wells Brown
An African American Life
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist 'Biography'
A groundbreaking biography of the most pioneering and accomplished African-American writer of the nineteenth century.
Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone’s, “rented” out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as “Sandy” reinvented himself as “William Wells” Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits (both American and British) and went on to write the earliest African American works in a plethora of genres: travelogue, novel (the now canonized Clotel), printed play, and history. He also practiced medicine, ran for office, and campaigned for black uplift, temperance, and civil rights.
Ezra Greenspan’s masterful work, elegantly written and rigorously researched, sets Brown’s life in the richly rendered context of his times, creating a fascinating portrait of an inventive writer who dared to challenge the racial orthodoxies and explore the racial complexities of nineteenth-century America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Greenspan, an English professor at Southern Methodist University, reconsiders the life of William Wells Brown, a once-prominent but widely forgotten activist whose "eventful life of journeys" makes for a rich and essential addition to the annals of African-American history. Brown was born into slavery and escaped to the North before emigrating to London, where he established a highly productive writing and lecturing practice of "nonstop activism." He continued this practice upon returning to the U.S. at the dawn of the Civil War, and despite receiving criticism for being a "self-serving black bourgeois," he was considered second only to Frederick Douglass (with whom he disputed publicly) as a respected African-American lecturer. A literary and cultural historian, Greenspan's scholarly interest in print media is evident in the emphasis placed on understanding Brown's rise from slavery as a "quest for personal identity... attained through literacy." In analyzing Brown's written oeuvre, critiquing his "proclivity for rewriting the past" in works of purported nonfiction, and expanding and clarifying the historic facts, Greenspan shows how Brown's life was a mirror of the "quick-change artists" that populate his writing. Greenspan's detailed study of this life of constant growth should win Brown his proper place in American history.
