As William Wells Brown's first published work and his most widely read autobiography, the 1847 Narrative occupies an important place within not only his oeuvre but also the broader African American literary tradition. Brown would draw directly from the text in many of his later works, among them Clotel, The Escape, and My Southern Home. Preceding this account of Brown's life, however, are two letters and a preface. The first letter William Wells Brown himself writes in thanks to "Wells Brown, of Ohio" (iii), while the second, written by Edmund Quincy, remarks upon the variety of Brown's experiences and praises the manuscript's "simplicity and calmness" (vi). Following J. C. Hathaway's Preface, largely an appeal on behalf of the abolitionist cause, Brown opens his narrative noting that his father was the white George Higgins, a relative of his master, and that his enslaved mother, Elizabeth, had given birth to seven children, each with a different father. In doing so, Brown immediately draws attention to the plight of mixed-race individuals as well as the tenuous nature of slave families.

The Exciting, True, and Adventurous Slave Narratives of Three Fugitive Slaves: William W. Brown, John Thompson, and Henry Watson

The Making of the Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926 includes over 20,000 analytical, theoretical and practical works on American and British Law. It includes the writings of major legal theorists, including Sir Edward Coke, Sir William Blackstone, James Fitzjames Stephen, Frederic William Maitland, John Marshall, Joseph Story, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Roscoe Pound, among others. Legal Treatises includes casebooks, local practice manuals, form books, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, speeches and other works of the most influential writers of their time. It is of great value to researchers of domestic and international law, government and politics, legal history, business and economics, criminology and much more.++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++Harvard Law School Libraryocm20764469The body of the work consists solely of decisions of the Court of Appeals"--Pref. Also issued in set in 1933 as fiche nos. 78655-78661.Rochester, N.Y.: Williamson & Higbie, 1887. xx, 629 p.: forms; 23 cm.

The first novel published by an African American, Clotel takes up the story, in circulation at the time, that Thomas Jefferson fathered an illegitimate mulatto daughter who was sold into slavery. Powerfully reimagining this story, and weaving together a variety of contemporary source materials, Brown fills the novel with daring escapes and encounters, as well as searing depictions of the American slave trade. An innovative and challenging work of literary invention, Clotel is receiving much renewed attention today.

William Wells Brown, though born into slavery, escaped to become one of the most prominent reformers of the nineteenth century and one of the earliest historians of the black experience. This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition reproduces the first, 1853, edition of Clotel and includes, as did that edition, his autobiographical narrative, "The Life and Escape of William Wells Brown," plus newly written notes.