He was born to Elizabeth, a slave woman and a white relative of his owner. Mr. Brown grew up near St. Louis, Mo. While William was still only a child he was separated from his mother and hired out to the captain of a St.Louis steamboat in the booming Mississippi River trade. He was a house slave, which is better than a field slave he says in the article, “William Wells Brown,” he says, “ I was a house servant - a situation preferable to that of a field hand, as I was better fed, better clothed, and not obliged to rise at the ringing of the bell, but about half an hour after." After a year of being a slave, he was taken to work in a printing office of Elijah P. Lovejoy, an abolitionist. Mr. Brown spent twenty years of …show more content…
Brown was remarkable, for besides oration and documentary reports he also produced a novel, European travel book, plays, several historical studies, and reflective memoirs. He spoke up against slavery even though everyone was for slavery. “William Wells Brown’s commitment to the struggle for freedom and equality for the blacks was a consuming passion that found expression, not alone in effort to affect his goals through legislation and political activity.” The main problem was that 20th-century American culture accommodated only one 19th-century black man, a spot already taken by the monumental, best-selling Frederick Douglass. Another problem was theoretical: Farrison published his biography before the flowering of two other fields crucial to a full appreciation of Brown’s public life — the history of the book and performance art. “He expressed himself in the idiom of literature.” “He was hired by the American Anti-Slavery Society; he worked closely with famous abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to help explore the field of African American literature and speech.” The Narrative of William W. Brown: A Fugitive, written by himself, is his most acclaimed novel that describes his emotional life as a slave. Yet it is the evident redundancy in his work that accounts for Brown’s present significance. In his autobiography, Brown’s first published