Books like Clotel

If Clotel stayed with you, these share its feel: defiance, freedom and society. Each comes with a real page, so you can tell in a minute.

About Clotel · William Wells Brown

1.Iola Leroy

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1892

Also society and freedom. A Civil War novel that follows a fair-skinned enslaved woman and her brother as emancipation forces them to decide what race, family and freedom will mean.

When the war is over I intend to search the country for my mother. Doctor, were you to give me a palace-like home, with velvet carpets to hush my tread, and magnificence to surround my way, I should miss her voice amid all other tones, her presence amid every scene. Oh, you do not know how hungry my heart is for my mother! Were I to marry you I would carry an aching heart into your home and dim its brightness. I have resolved never to marry until I have found my mother. The hope of finding her has colored all my life since I regained my freedom. It has helped sustain me in the hour of fearful trial.
2.Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup, 1853

Also society and freedom. A free Black man is kidnapped into slavery and spends twelve years using memory, music and stubborn hope to survive and testify.

The building to which the yard was attached, was two stories high, fronting on one of the public streets of Washington. Its outside presented only the appearance of a quiet private residence. A stranger looking at it, would never have dreamed of its execrable uses. Strange as it may seem, within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave’s chains, almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!
3.Contending Forces

Pauline E. Hopkins, 1897

Also defiance and curiosity. A vital look at the complex realities of life for African Americans at the turn of the century, exploring the tension between oppression and ambition.

“Lynching was instituted to crush the manhood of the enfranchised black. Rape is the crime which appeals most strongly to the heart, of the home life. Merciful God! Irony of ironies! The men who created the mulatto race, who recruit its ranks year after year by the very means which they invoked lynch law to suppress, bewailing the sorrows of violated womanhood!
4.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain, 1884

Also freedom and society. A runaway boy and an enslaved man drift a raft down the Mississippi, and a child's plain talk quietly dismantles everything the adults around him believe.

This second night we run between seven and eight hours, with a current that was making over four mile an hour. We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed—only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all—that night, nor the next, nor the next.
5.John Brown’s Body

Stephen Vincent Benét, 1928

Also freedom and memory. A Pulitzer-winning verse novel of the Civil War that moves from John Brown's raid to Appomattox, mixing real voices, soldiers' dread, and the strange intimacy of a country at war with itself.

Sally Dupré, from the high porch of her houseStared at the road. They would be here soon enough.She had waved a flag the last time they went away.This time she would wave her hand or her handkerchief.That was what women did. The column passed byAnd the women waved, and it came back and they waved,And, in between, if you loved, you lived by a dullClock of long minutes that passed like sunbonneted womenEach with the same dry face and the same set hands.I have read, they have told me that love is a pretty godWith light wings stuck to his shoulders. They did not tell meThat love is nursing a hawk with yellow eyes,That love is feeding your heart to the beak of the hawkBecause an old woman, gossiping, uttered a name.
6.Memoirs of a Revolutionist

Peter Kropotkin, 1899

Also freedom and curiosity. A prince trained as a geographer gives up court, career and inheritance to organize with workers — and reports on power from both sides of the wall.

But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children? From somebody’s mouth it must be taken, because the aggregate production of mankind remains still so low.
7.Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell, 1949

Also freedom and memory. A clerk who rewrites old newspapers starts a private diary, and every small act of independent thought becomes a crime.
8.The Call of the Wild

Jack London, 1903

Also freedom and society. A pampered dog is stolen, sold to the Klondike gold rush, and taught the club before he learns the sled — then something older starts calling.
9.The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck, 1931

Also society and grief. A raw, epic chronicle of displacement and despair that examines what happens when the American dream meets the harsh realities of the Dust Bowl.
10.Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury, 1953

Also freedom and memory. A fireman who burns books begins to read one, in a future where screens are family and speed is peace.
11.Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852

Also society and grief. A bestseller that turned a national argument into faces, voices and kitchens—and still asks who pays for the comfort of others.
12.Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864

Also freedom and defiance. A furious, funny, self-lacerating monologue from a Petersburg clerk who argues that freedom begins where reason and self-interest end.