Clotel; or, The President's Daughter - Tapa blanda

Clotel; or, The President's Daughter is an 1853 novel by United States author and playwright William Wells Brown, an escaped slave from Kentucky who was active on the anti-slavery circuit. Brown published the book in London, where he stayed to evade possible recapture due to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, but it is considered the first novel published by an African American and is set in the United States, reflecting the southern institution of slavery. Three additional versions were published through 1867. The novel explores slavery's destructive effects on African-American families, the difficult lives of American mulattoes or mixed-race people, and the "degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the United States of America." It is a tragic mulatto story about a woman named Currer and her daughters Althesa and Clotel, fathered by Thomas Jefferson; their relatively comfortable lives end after Jefferson's death.

William Wells Brown (November 6, 1814 – November 6, 1884) was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer. His novel Clotel (1853) is considered the first novel written by an African American; it was published in London, where he was living at the time. Brown was a pioneer in several different literary genres, including travel writing, fiction, and drama.