William Wells Brown, Frances E.W. Harper, and Charles W. Chesnutt, three black writers who bore witness to the experience of their people under slavery, create a portrait of black life in the 19th century in these three novels.

Three Classic African-American Novels : Clotel, Iola Leroy, The Marrow of Tradition (Vintage Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Chesnutt, Charles

Harper, Frances Ellen Watkin

Brown, William W.

United States

Vintage

The first novel published by an African American, Clotel takes up the story, in circulation at the time, that Thomas Jefferson fathered an illegitimate mulatto daughter who was sold into slavery. Powerfully reimagining this story, and weaving together a variety of contemporary source materials, Brown fills the novel with daring escapes and encounters, as well as searing depictions of the American slave trade. An innovative and challenging work of literary invention, Clotel is receiving much renewed attention today. William Wells Brown, though born into slavery, escaped to become one of the most prominent reformers of the nineteenth century and one of the earliest historians of the black experience. This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition reproduces the first, 1853, edition of Clotel and includes, as did that edition, his autobiographical narrative, "The Life and Escape of William Wells Brown," plus newly written notes.

Clotel: or, The President's Daughter (Modern Library Classics)

Hilton, Als

Modern Library

The Exciting, True, and Adventurous Slave Narratives of Three Fugitive Slaves: William W. Brown, John Thompson, and Henry Watson

The Exciting, True, and Adventurous Slave Narratives of Three Fugitive Slaves: William W. Brown, John Thompson, and Henry Watson

History

THOMPSON, John

Mitchell, J.

Watson, Henry

Americas

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Although of historic interest simply by virtue of the fact that William Wells Brown appears to have been the first African American to write a novel, Clotel is much more than a literary curiosity: it is an eminently readable and emotionally powerful, portrait of the dehumanizing horrors of slave life in the Ante-bellum South. Brown, himself an escaped slave, tells the story of the slave Currer and her daughters, Clotel and Althesa, and of their attempts to escape from slavery. The unacknowledged father of the girls, President Thomas Jefferson, is the reason for the title and a theme that runs through the book. There is an immediacy to the stories here--of slave auctions, of families being torn apart, of card games where humans are wagered and lost, of sickly slaves being purchased for the express purpose of resale for medical experimentation upon their imminent deaths, of suicides and of many more indignities and brutalities--which no textbook can adequately convey. Though the characters tend too much to the archetypal, Brown does put a human face on this most repellent of American tragedies. He also makes extensive use of actual sermons, lectures, political pamphlets, newspaper advertisements, and the like, to give the book something of a docudrama effect.

Clotel: Or the President's Daughter

Humor & Satire

Slave Narratives Collection

Turner, Nat

Jacobs, Harriet

DOUGLASS, FREDERICK

EQUIANO, OLAUDAH

Prince, Mary

Truth, Sojourner

Bibb, Henry

Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, James Albert

Northrup, Solomon

World Literature

Independently published

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