William wells brown autobiography definition
William wells brown autobiography definition
William wells brown african-american.
From the Introduction to From Fugitive Slave to Free Man: The Autobiographies of William Wells Brown (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 2003.)
William L. Andrews
William Wells Brown was born in 1814 on a plantation near Lexington, Kentucky, the son of a white man and a slave woman.
Light-complexioned and quick-witted, William spent his first twenty years mainly in St. Louis, Missouri, and its vicinity, working as a house servant, a field hand, a tavernkeeper's assistant, a printer's helper, an assistant in a medical office, and finally as a handyman for James Walker, a Missouri slave trader with whom Brown claimed to have made three trips up and down the Mississippi River between St.
Louis and the New Orleans slave market. Before he escaped from slavery on New Year's Day, 1834, this unusually well-traveled slave had seen and experienced slavery from almost every perspective, an education that he would put to good use throughout his literary career.
After seizing his fr