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Why is William Wells Brown’s Clotel considered a landmark in African American literature?

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Phillis Wheatley's first book of poetry — African American literature Frontispiece and title page of *Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral* (1773) by Phillis Wheatley, the first Black woman to become a poet of note in the United States. The portrait on which the frontispiece's engraving is based is often attributed to Scipio Moorhead, an Black artist and writer who, like Wheatley, was enslaved and living in Boston.

Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) is a landmark in African American literature primarily because it is recognized as the first novel written by an African American author, William Wells Brown.312

The work is significant for its exploration of the brutal realities of slavery, specifically addressing themes of miscegenation and concubinage through the tragic story of the daughters and granddaughters of Thomas Jefferson and an enslaved woman named Currer. By depicting the lives of women who could pass for white yet remained subject to the dehumanizing constraints of the slave system, Brown provided critical insight into antebellum slave culture.312

While the novel has been noted by critics for its melodramatic tone and characterization, its publication established a foundational precedent for Black American prose, marking a pivotal moment in the 19th-century literary renaissance.31