William Wells Brown

Abstract

Born in Kentucky, probably in 1814, William Wells Brown was, in a long and active career, among other things, an antislavery lecturer and conductor of the Underground Railroad; a tireless advocate for the temperance cause; a barber; a medical doctor of questionable expertise; an author of poems, novels, autobiographies, travel narratives, and historical studies; and one of Frederick Douglass’s rivals for preeminence in the field of 19th-century black male leadership. Having escaped from slavery, Brown soon became active in the temperance movement, and active as well in helping fellow fugitive slaves escape to relative freedom—but Brown’s future was influenced particularly by his attendance at the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo in 1843, at which meeting he met the great antislavery leader Frederick Douglass. By the end of that year, Brown was an agent for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, and, in 1844, Brown presented his first significant antislavery speech at the tenth anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1847 Brown, now estranged from his wife, moved to Boston and became a lecturing agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. There he published his Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, a book that helped to establish him as an increasingly important leader in the antislavery movement. In the years that followed, Brown traveled extensively, both in the United States and abroad, and published in virtually every literary genre—fiction, autobiography, poetry, drama, history, and travel—in addition to writing for numerous newspapers in the United States and Great Britain and publishing orations from his long career as a professional lecturer on various subjects. But even though Brown has long been recognized for his pioneering work—as one of the first African American novelists, playwrights, travel writers, and historians—critical recognition of and appreciation for his achievements was somewhat slow in coming. Although the historical importance of his publications has long been acknowledged, early commentary on his work ranged from critical to dismissive. But with the development of African American literary scholarship from the 1970s onward, and with new and prominently published anthologies and reference works in the 1990s, Brown’s fortunes slowly rose. Today, he is appreciated nearly as much as a historian, playwright, and travel writer as he is as the author of Clotel.