Clotel -Or- The President's Daughter: The First African American Novel - Paperback

Clotel: or, The President's Daughter is a landmark of American literature: the first novel published by an African American author and a powerful abolitionist indictment of slavery, race, hypocrisy, and national contradiction. William Wells Brown builds his story around the imagined daughters of Thomas Jefferson and an enslaved woman, using that explosive premise to expose the moral failure of a republic that proclaimed liberty while holding human beings as property.

First published in 1853, Clotel combines fiction, documentary material, political argument, sentimental narrative, and anti-slavery witness. Its story follows women whose lives are shaped by enslavement, sale, family separation, racial violence, sexual exploitation, escape, and the cruel instability of a system in which legal status can destroy love, kinship, and identity. Brown's novel is not merely an early work of African American fiction; it is a direct confrontation with the myths America told about itself.

This SMK edition is suited to readers of classic American literature, African American literature, abolitionist writing, slavery narratives, nineteenth-century fiction, political fiction, and the literary history of race in the United States. Clotel remains essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of African American fiction, the literature of slavery and freedom, and the long struggle to force American ideals to face American realities.