After seizing his freedom, Brown (who received his middle and last name from an Ohio Quaker who helped him get to Canada) worked for nine years as a steamboat man on Lake Erie and a conductor for the Underground Railroad in Buffalo, New York. In 1843, the fugitive slave became a lecturing agent for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. Moving to Boston in 1847, he wrote the first, and still the most famous, version of his autobiography, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself, which went through four American and five British editions before 1850, earning its author international fame.

Brown’s abolitionist career was marked by a turning point in the summer of 1843 when Buffalo hosted a national antislavery convention and the National Convention of Colored Citizens. Brown’s expanded service to the antislavery community brought an invitation to lecture before the Americ

Perhaps more than any other text of its kind, the Narrative of William W. Brown characterizes in its subject matter and develops the basic plot structure of the slave narrative. Though in many ways Brown's story may be read as a prototype of the variety in which he wrote, his manner of telling that story is more distinctively his own. Compared to the highly self-conscious rhetorical flourishes of Frederick Douglass's narrative, Brown's decidedly understated, restrained, almost expressionless, manner of recounting his life seems innocent. The introduction to Brown’s Narrative, which is a letter from Edmond Quincy stresses how much the white man “marveled” at Brown's “simplicity and calmness” in describing scenes that cried out for powerful feeling. However, Brown also understood that by writing with “simplicity and sincerity” he could set forward “many harrowing scenes” of slavery without jeopardizing his reader's “conviction of the truthfulness of the picture.”

The Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave was written in 1847, which was the first, and still famous, version of his autobiography. In 1848, the second edition of Brown’s Narrative, slightly but significantly revised and expanded by a lengthy appendix, was published in a printing of two thousand, which quickly sold out. A third edition followed, and in May of 1849 a fourth expanded once again. Brown gave a history of his own sufferings in slavery, as well as the sufferings of others whom he was acquainted, or which he had immediate observation.

"Why stands she near the auction stand? That girl so young and fair; what brings her to this dismal place? Why stands she weeping there? Why does she raise that bitter cry? Why hangs her head with shame, as now the auctioneer's rough voice so rudely calls her name! But see! She grasps a manly hand, and in a voice so low, as scarcely to behead, she says,” My brother, must I go?” A moment's pause: then, midst a wail of agonizing woe,

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