William Wells Brown: An African American Life by Ezra Greenspan (review)

A sweeping biography of one of America’s most inventive, talented, and often overlooked sons, Ezra Greenspan’s William Wells Brown: An African American Life tracks the elusive figure and life of former slave, abolitionist, writer, actor, and popular historian William Wells Brown. Born into slavery, Brown’s story has been over the years eclipsed by that of his more famous contemporary, the fugitive slave and abolitionist writer Frederick Douglass.

Greenspan reveals a complex man who, due to circumstances and out of necessity, played fast and loose with the details of his reinvented life pre- and post-slavery. Brown is most well known for his novel Clotel, which helped keep alive the rumors of Thomas Jefferson’s many sired children with Sally Hemings. Despite the voluminous body of scholarship created by Brown, Greenspan’s efforts to re-create that rich life were frustrated by the fact that Brown left no virtually no archive of letters, etc. And yet, the biographer had enough material to fill more than six hundred pages. William Wells Brown: An African American Life is a well-written, exhaustive, and wholly engaging narrative.