<I>Clotelle; Or, The Colored Heroine, a Tale of the Southern States</I>

Written by William Wells Brown and first published in England in 1853, Clotelle is widely considered the first novel by an African American author. Brown was born enslaved in Lexington, Kentucky in 1815. He escaped in 1834, first to Canada and then residing in New York where he was an active lecturer in the American abolitionist movement. A self-taught writer, his first book was the autobiographical The Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave in 1842. He wrote Clotelle while living in England following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.