William Wells Brown: An African American Life

Greenspan, an English professor at Southern Methodist University, reconsiders the life of William Wells Brown, a once-prominent but widely forgotten activist whose “eventful life of journeys” makes for a rich and essential addition to the annals of African-American history. Brown was born into slavery and escaped to the North before emigrating to London, where he established a highly productive writing and lecturing practice of “nonstop activism.” He continued this practice upon returning to the U.S. at the dawn of the Civil War, and despite receiving criticism for being a “self-serving black bourgeois,” he was considered second only to Frederick Douglass (with whom he disputed publicly) as a respected African-American lecturer. A literary and cultural historian, Greenspan’s scholarly interest in print media is evident in the emphasis placed on understanding Brown’s rise from slavery as a “quest for personal identity... attained through literacy.” In analyzing Brown’s written oeuvre, critiquing his “proclivity for rewriting the past” in works of purported nonfiction, and expanding and clarifying the historic facts, Greenspan shows how Brown’s life was a mirror of the “quick-change artists” that populate his writing. Greenspan’s detailed study of this life of constant growth should win Brown his proper place in American history. (Aug.)