William Wells Brown, born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Missouri frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone's, and "rented" out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, escaped from his final master at age 19, quickly lifted himself out of illiteracy and innumeracy, and over a forty-year career reinvented himself as an author, public speaker, multimedia performer, civil rights activist, and medical doctor. He became the most prolific, pioneering nineteenth-century African American author.  His publications included the earliest known African American novel, play, travelogue, and history of the Civil War. Internationally known in his own time as a writer and lecturer, he disappeared from general sight with the advent of Jim Crow. Ezra Greenspan’s new comprehensive literary and political biography tells the story of one of the most remarkable Americans of his time and, in the process, with him in the center, retells the story of the life and times of nineteenth-century America.

Sponsored by UK Department of History, Department of English, African-American and Africana Studies Program

For more information, email Professor Jeremy Popkin of the Department of History at popkin@uky.edu.