William Wells Brown: An African American Life [Hardcover]

Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boones, 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 canonizedAn informative and often moving account.Ezra Greenspans painstaking historical research and artful insights of literary analysis have returned William Wells Brown to his rightful place&The very soul of this talented and complex man is laid bare by Greenspans rich contextualization of Browns abolitionist success, his remarkably prolific writing, and his legal statelessness in America yet cosmopolitan status as world citizen.A compelling life of one of the most remarkable men of the nineteenth centurya boon to our understanding of African American and American culture.A scholarly tour de force. Drawing from an astonishing range of primary materials, Greenspan renders Browns life in a gripping, elegant narrative that opens up many new vistas on Brown and his world.Rich and fascinating&Ezra Greenspan has accomplished a remarkable feat of innovative research and has lucidly brought Brown, the self-taught former slave, to life as a person and as a writer who repeatedly reinvented himself in several genres while producing a brilliant critique of Americas dilemma with race.In his day, Brown rivaled Frederick Douglass as a prominent black abolitionist and exceeded him as an author of important histories and biographies of African Americans. Ezra Greenspans definitive biography rescues Brown from undeserved obscurity.William Wells Brown not only was the first African American nlc3