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

Perhaps William Wells Brown’s time has finally come. The man who published his own account of slavery two years after the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass appeared in 1845 remained in his formidable predecessor’s shadow for the remainder of his life—and that shadow only lengthened after death. As if to compensate for his initial belatedness, Brown became a literary trailblazer—author of “the earliest African American travelogue (Three Years in Europe, 1852),” “the earliest African American novel (the now canonized Clotel, 1853),” “the earliest printed African American play (The Escape, 1858),” “a pioneering history of African Americans (The Black Man, 1863),” and “the first history of African American military service in the Civil War (The Negro in the American Rebellion, 1867)” (4). Brown’s composite history of the African diaspora, The Rising Son (1873), may not have been a “black first” along the same lines, but My Southern Home (1880), Brown’s unsettling contribution to the plantation school of literature, certainly was. Brown coupled relentless literary innovation with multimedia performance artistry, accompanying his lectures with songs from his Anti-Slavery Harp (1848), one-man readings of his stage plays, “dissolving views” from his magic-lantern slides, and an outsized panorama of slavery. After the Civil War he advocated temperance and equal rights, even starting his own publishing company to do so, until his death from bladder cancer on November 6, 1884. A century later, Brown’s versatility and productivity ensured him a place in an expanding American canon. Yet, despite his ubiquity in early African American literary history, Brown does not exert the same hold on the public memory of slavery as figures like Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Booker T. Washington, and Harriet Tubman—or even, more recently, Margaret Garner and Solomon Northup.

By rights, all that should change. In the 1840s, Brown’s claim to a unique place in the increasingly crowded field of formerly enslaved speakers and authors centered on his experience of slavery in the West. Having traveled up and down the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, Brown could speak to the internal slave trade as it was conducted on that epitome of American progress and Manifest Destiny, the steamboat. Today his remains one of the few published antebellum narratives to recount the very different form that slavery took in the state that gave us the Missouri Compromise, Dred Scott, Mark Twain, and, now, Ferguson.

Brown’s newest biographer, Ezra Greenspan (William Edward Farrison’s William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer came out in 1969), is one of the foremost scholars in the field of book history. Greenspan’s book-historical chops make him the ideal literary biographer for Brown, whose practice of lifting, revising, and republishing his own and others’ works left a bedeviling, if intriguing, oeuvre. In this Brown resembles Herman Melville—although, as Greenspan notes, in contrast to Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others in their (white, male) American Renaissance cohort, Brown was largely successful in “earning his living primarily, if not exclusively, as a literary/cultural professional” (356). Only after the Civil War did Brown begin to supplement his income by practicing medicine. As Greenspan astutely notes, Brown’s was a career grounded in “the combination of opportunity and commitment” (426). Greenspan’s keen bibliographic eye allows him to show how Brown’s reformist commitments and entrepreneurial opportunities yielded the remarkable range of works attributed to him. Scholars will come to this notorious literary trickster with a much firmer sense of his authorial, editorial, and publishing practice, thanks to Greenspan’s careful research and attentiveness to material textual evidence.

But to go beyond William Wells Brown, the author, and give us “an African American life,” the biography needs either to expand inward, into Brown’s personal life, or outward, into the nineteenth-century worlds of slavery and reform that shaped that life. To give us William Wells Brown, the man, seems nearly impossible. From first to last, from his Narrative to...