William Wells Brown: An African American Life (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780393240900)

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, 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 canonized Clotel), printed play, and history. He also practiced medicine, ran for office, and campaigned for black uplift, temperance, and civil rights.

Ezra Greenspan's masterful work, elegantly written and rigorously researched, sets Brown's life in the richly rendered context of his times, creating a fascinating portrait of an inventive writer who dared to challenge the racial orthodoxies and explore the racial complexities of nineteenth-century America.

Author: Ezra Greenspan
ISBN-10: 0393240908
ISBN-13: 9780393240900
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 10/06/2014
Pages: 624
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 2.35lbs
Size: 9.65h x 6.50w x 1.90d
Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Finalist

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 03/15/2014 pg. 94
Library Journal 03/15/2014 pg. 94
Kirkus Reviews 06/15/2014
Publishers Weekly 06/23/2014
Library Journal 09/15/2014 pg. 91
New Yorker (The) 10/20/2014 pg. 99
Library Journal 11/01/2014 pg. 98
New York Times Book Review 11/16/2014 pg. 14
New York Times Book Review 11/23/2014 pg. 38
Kirkus Best Nonfiction 12/01/2014 pg. 22