William Wells Brown: An African American Life (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

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, this quintessential American reinvented himself as "William Wells" Brown after escaping to freedom. Lifting himself out of illiteracy, he 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. Elegantly written and painstakingly researched, Ezra Greenspan's masterful work sets Brown's life in the richly rendered context of his times, creating a fascinating portrait of a writer who dared to live and explore the racial complexities of nineteenth-century America.