Sign-In
Cart
Clotel
Paperback
Publisher Price: $22.95
Publisher: Lushena Books
Published: Sep 11 2025
Pages: 198
Weight: 0.69
Height: 0.54 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853) by William Wells Brown is the first published novel by an African American. It tells the story of Clotel, the fictional mixed-race daughter of Thomas Jefferson and an enslaved woman, and explores the devastating effects of slavery on Black families.
The novel follows Clotel and her sister Althesa, who, despite their partial white ancestry and education, are still enslaved and subjected to exploitation, betrayal, and separation. Clotel endures heartbreak, escapes bondage, and struggles for freedom, but her life ends tragically when she leaps into the Potomac River to avoid recapture.
Through its characters' suffering, the novel highlights themes of racial injustice, the hypocrisy of American democracy, and the destruction of families under slavery, making it both a work of fiction and a powerful abolitionist statement.
Also from
William Wells Brown
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Baughman, Judith
Paperback