William Wells Brown – författare

By 1849, the Narrative of William W. Brown was in its fourth edition, having sold over 8,000 copies in less than eighteen months and making it one of the fastest-selling antislavery tracts of its time. The book's popularity can be attributed both to the strong voice of its author and Brown's notoriety as an abolitionist speaker. The son of a slave and a white man, Brown recounts his years in servitude, his cruel masters, and the brutal whippings he and those around him received. He provides a detailed description of his failed attempt to escape with his mother; after their capture, they were sold to new masters. A subsequent escape attempt succeeds. He is taken in by a kind Quaker, Wells Brown, whose name he adopts in gratitude. Shortly thereafter, Brown crosses the Canadian border. Brown's Narrative includes stories of fighting devious slave traders and bounty hunters, various antislavery poems, articles and stories (written by him and others), newspaper clippings, reward posters, and slave sale announcements. A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings selected classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available as downloadable e-books or print-on-demand publications. DocSouth Books are unaltered from the original publication, providing affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.

The culmination of William Wells Brown's long writing career, My Southern Home is the story of Brown's search for a home in a land of slavery and racism. Brown (1814-84), a prolific and celebrated abolitionist and writer often recognized as the first African American novelist for his Clotel (1853), was born enslaved in Kentucky and escaped to Ohio in 1834. In this comprehensive edition, John Ernest acts as a surefooted guide to this seminal work, beginning with a substantial introduction placing Brown's life and work in cultural and historical context. Brown addresses from a post-emancipation vantage point his early experiences and understanding of the world of slavery and describes his travels through many southern states. The text itself is presented in its original form, while Ernest's annotations highlight its layered complexity and document the many instances in which Brown borrows from his own earlier writings and the writings of others to form an underlying dialogue. This edition sheds new light on Brown's literary craft and provides readers with the maps they need to follow Brown on his quest for home in the chaotic social landscape of American southern culture in the final decades of the nineteenth century. |The culmination of William Wells Brown's long writing career, My Southern Home is the story of Brown's search for a home in a land of slavery and racism. In this comprehensive edition, John Ernest acts as a surefooted guide to this seminal work, beginning with a substantial introduction placing Brown's life and work in cultural and historical context.

In 1863, as the Civil War raged, the escaped slave, abolitionist, and novelist William Wells Brown identified two groups most harmful to his race. "The first and most relentless," he explained, "are those who have done them the greatest injury, by being instrumental in their enslavement and consequent degradation. They delight to descant upon the 'natural inferiority' of the blacks, and claim that we were destined only for a servile condition, entitled neither to liberty nor the legitimate pursuit of happiness.""The second class," Brown concluded, "are those who are ignorant of the characteristics of the race, and are the mere echoes of the first." Four years later, Brown wrote the first military history of African Americans, The Negro in the American Rebellion. This text assailed those whose hatred and ignorance inclined them to keep blacks oppressed after Appomattox.This critical edition of The Negro in the American Rebellion, one of Brown's least-analyzed texts, is the first to appear in more than three decades. In his introduction, historian John David Smith identifies the text's Anglo-American abolitionist roots, sets it in the context of Brown's other writings, appraises it as military history, analyzes its interpretation of black masculinity and honor, and focuses closely on Brown's assessment of contemporary racial tensions.Largely ignored by scholars, The Negro in the American Rebellion, Smith argues, is a powerful transitional text, one that confronted squarely the neo-slavery of the Reconstruction era."Whites," Brown wrote, "appear determined to reduce the blacks to a state of serfdom if they cannot have them as slaves." His important text was a call to arms in the ongoing race struggle. Smith's analysis, framed within recent scholarship on slavery, emancipation, and African American participation in the U.S. army, is long overdue.