Clotel follows the fictional descendants of an enslaved woman said to be fathered by Thomas Jefferson himself, tracing how slavery fractured families across generations even within the households of the powerful.
William Wells Brown escaped slavery as a young man and became a leading abolitionist lecturer before writing Clotel in 1853, the first novel published by an African American author. Bold, angry and unflinching for its time, it remains a landmark of the tradition every later diaspora novelist has built on.
