William Wells Brown
Subtitle: a reader
By: edited by Ezra Greenspan.
Contributors: Greenspan, Ezra.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 448
ISBN-13: 9780820332239; 9780820332246
Subjects: Brown, William Wells, -- 1814?-1884 -- Literary art; Brown, William Wells, -- 1814?-1884; Brown, William Wells, -- 1814?-1884 -- Travel; African Americans -- Historiography; Autobiography -- African American authors; American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism; Antislavery movements -- United States -- Historiography; African Americans -- Biography; African American authors -- Biography; Fugitive slaves -- United States -- Biography
Genres: Biography.
Work titles: Selections.
Description: "Born into slavery in Kentucky, William Wells Brown (1814-1884) was kept functionally illiterate until after his escape at the age of nineteen. Remarkably, he became the most widely published and versatile African American writer of the nineteenth century as well as an important leader in the abolitionist and temperance movements.".

"Brown wrote extensively as a journalist but was also a pioneer in other literary genres. His many groundbreaking works include Clotel, the first African American novel; The Escape: or, A Leap for Freedom, the first published African American play; Three Years in Europe, the first African American European travelogue; and The Negro in the American Rebellion, the first history of African American military service in the Civil War. Brown also wrote one of the most important fugitive slave narratives and a striking array of subsequent self-narratives so inventively shifting in content, form, and textual presentation as to place him second only to Frederick Douglass among nineteenth-century African American autobiographers.".

"Ezra Greenspan has selected the best of Brown's work in a range of fields including fiction, drama, history, politics, autobiography, and travel. The volume opens with an introductory essay that places Brown and his work in a cultural and political context. Each chapter begins with a detailed introductory headnote, and the contents are closely annotated; there is also a selected bibliography. This reader offers an introduction to the work of a major African American writer who was engaged in many of the important debates of his time."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Writing fugitive slave autobiography; title: Writing antislavery oratory; title: Writing African American travelogue; title: Writing African American fiction; title: Writing African American drama; title: Writing African American history; title: Writing African American Civil War history; title: Writing African American memoir.