Written by a man who had himself escaped slavery, the novel follows Clotelle, a young enslaved woman of mixed descent, through slave sales, a slave-holding parson’s household, imprisonment and flight. Its pages expose the auction block, the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and the hypocrisy of Southern piety.
Brown’s reworking of Clotel (1853), the first novel published by an African American, is a landmark of antislavery fiction. Download the free EPUB.