In the time of Brown, however, it was but a rumor, and an incendiary one at that.īrown, too, was the son of a mixed-race slave mother and a powerful, white father. In recent decades, the DNA testing that revealed Jefferson as the probable father of Sally Hemings’ children has become well known and nearly universally accepted. Brown blurs fact with fiction throughout the story, but the first bombshell of hybrid reality he drops is by far the most explosive: Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father, author of the Declaration of Independence, and third president of the United States, is Clotel and Althesa’s father. He spent his first 20 years as chattel, then escaped slavery to become a doctor, a helper in the Underground Railroad, a poet, an abolitionist, an internationally acclaimed memoirist, and the first African American to publish a novel.Ĭlotel begins with Currer, a mixed-raced slave, and her two teenaged daughters, Althesa and Clotel, being sold at auction. To say that William Wells Brown - born and raised simply as “William,” the son of a slave, and therefore a slave himself - led a remarkable life is to put his life in uncomfortably light terms. Charlotte Brontë gave us Villette, Dickens completed Bleak House, and Herman Melville published his multi-layered novella Bartleby, the Scrivener, which readers have admired and puzzled over ever since.īut the most astounding book that year was Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter by William Wells Brown, a novel whose relative lack of popularity can’t uproot it from its central place in American literature. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.The year 1853 was a good one in the literary anglosphere. This tragic story brilliantly explores the complex history of slavery in the first part of the 19th century. In her quest for freedom we find an ill-fated soul caught up in the difficulty of race relations in early American life.

Through this central character we witness the struggles of a person of mixed race in dealing with their split identity in a racially divided society. In 'Clotel', we follow the story of Clotel, a mixed-race daughter of Thomas Jefferson. Even more direct is Brown's confrontation of Thomas Jefferson's controversial intimacy with his slaves, a relationship which bore many mixed race children. William Wells Brown confronts the hypocrisy of slavery, examining the detrimental effects it has on society.

The long untouched subject matter of mixed race identity during the antebellum South is here treated with great deft and bravery. William Wells Brown, who is credited with being the first African American novelist, crafts a groundbreaking piece of American fiction in his 1853 work 'Clotel Or, The President's Daughter'.

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