William Wells Brown, was born in 1814 on a plantation near Lexington, Kentucky, the son of a white man and a slave woman. Light-complexioned and quick-witted, William spent his first twenty years in and around St. Louis, Missouri. Brown claimed to have made three trips up and down the Mississippi River between St. Louis and the New Orleans slave market. Before he escaped from slavery on New Year's Day, 1834, thus unusually well-traveled slave had seen and experienced slavery from almost every perspective, an education that he would put to good use throughout his literary career.

After one attempt, a re-capture, and a second attempt Brown seized his freedom, (Brown received his middle and last name from an Ohio Quaker who helped him get to Canada) worked for nine years as a steamboatman on Lake Erie and a conductor for the Underground Railroad in Buffalo, New York. In 1843, the fugitive slave became a lecturing agent for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. Moving to boston in 1847, he wrote the first, and still the most famous, version of his autobiography, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, which went through four American and five British editions before 1850, earning its author international fame. Brown's Narrative was exceeded in popularity and sales only by the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

Andrews, William L. Editor and Introduction. From Fugitive Slave to Free Man: The             Autobiographies of William Wells Brown. 1993 (New York: A Mentor Book): Front Cover             and page 3 respectively.

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