John Brown: A Biography (American History Through Literature) (Paperback)

by W. E. B. Du Bois (Author), John David Smith (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
First published in 1909, this biography defends abolitionist John Brown against all detractors who saw him as a fanatic, fiend or traitor. It shows Brown as an unusual leader with a deeply religious outlook and a devotion to the cause of freedom for the slave.

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A moving cultural biography of abolitionist martyr John Brown, by one of the most important African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century.

In the history of slavery and its legacy, John Brown looms large as a hero whose deeds partly precipitated the Civil War. As Frederick Douglass wrote: "When John Brown stretched forth his arm ... the clash of arms was at hand." DuBois's biography brings Brown stirringly to life and is a neglected classic. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 222 pages
• Publisher: M.E. Sharpe (April 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1563249723
• ISBN-13: 978-1563249723
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,754,847 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars John Brown: An American Hero, August 11, 2004

By	E. Ragan (NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: John Brown (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)

John Brown is often times overlooked as one of America's greatest heroes. His raid on Harper's Ferry was one of the most influential causes for the outbreak of the Civil War. Although the immediate effects of the war were greatly devastating, it hurtled the U.S. over the slavery issue and forward into the future.

Du Bois's biography gives a lengthy & descriptive account of the rebel's life and touched on a lot of info that I was unaware of. Definitely a must-buy for all those studying John Brown specifically, or the Civil War in general.

4.0 out of 5 stars Strike the Blow, February 3, 2006

By	Alfred Johnson (boston, ma) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: John Brown (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)

Please note that the substance of the following review has been
used in the review of Stephen Oates's book To Purge This Land in Blood reviewed elsewhere (click see all my reviews). Both books offer a good prospective on the life of John Brown and can be profitably read together. Dubois's book is a decent historical narrative of Brown's life from an earlier time and in a more partisan perspective. Oates book reflects more modern academic methods of analysis and research and tackles the weaknesses in other interpretations. In that sense, Oates book is close to the definitive study of John Brown's life. Most importantly, both books reflect a Northern view of Brown exploits previously long absent from the historical record. My review reflects the need to study an important American fighter for justice and for today's generation to learn some lessons from his life.


I would like to make a few comments on the role of Captain John Brown and his struggle at Harper's Ferry in 1859 in the history of the black liberation struggle. This appropriate as I am writing this review during Black History Month of 2006. Unfortunately John Brown continues to remain one of the very few white heroes of the struggle for black liberation.

From fairly early in my youth I knew the name John Brown and was swept up by the romance surrounding his exploits at Harpers Ferry. For example, I knew that the great anthem of the Civil War -The Battle Hymn of the Republic had a prior existence as a tribute to John Brown. I, however, was then neither familiar with the import of his exploits for the black liberation struggle nor knew much about the specifics of the politics of the various tendencies in the struggle against slavery. I certainly knew nothing then of Brown's (and his sons) prior military exploits in the Kansas wars against the expansion of slavery. If one understands the ongoing nature of his commitment to struggle one can only conclude that his was indeed a man on a mission. Those exploits also render absurd a very convenient myth about his `madness'. This is a political man and to these eyes a very worthy one. In the context of the turmoil of the times he was only the most courageous and audacious revolutionary in the struggle against the abolition of slavery in America.

Whether or not John Brown knew that his strategy would, in the short term, be defeated is a matter of dispute. Reams of paper have been spent proving the military foolhardiness of his scheme at Harper's Ferry. This missing the essential political point that militant action not continuing parliamentary maneuvering advocated by other abolitionists had become necessary. What is not in dispute is that Brown considered himself a true Calvinist avenging angel in the struggle against slavery and more importantly acted on that belief. In short, he was committed to bring justice to the black masses. This is why his exploits and memory stay alive after over 150 years.

Brown and his small integrated band of brothers fought bravely and coolly against great odds. Ten of Brown's men were killed including two of his sons. Five were captured, tried and executed, including Brown. These results are almost inevitable when one takes up a revolutionary struggle against the old order and one is not victorious. One need only think of, for example, the fate of the defenders of the Paris Commune in 1871. One can fault Brown on this or that tactical maneuver. Nevertheless he and the others bore themselves bravely in defeat. As we are all too painfully familiar there are defeats of the oppressed that lead nowhere. One thinks of the defeat of the Chinese Revolution in the 1920's. There other defeats that galvanize others into action. This is how Brown's actions should be measured by history.

Militarily defeated at Harpers Ferry, Brown's political mission to destroy slavery by force of arms nevertheless continued to galvanize important elements in the North at the expense of the pacifistic non-resistant Garrisonian political program for struggle against slavery. Many writers on Brown who reduce his actions to that of a `madman' still cannot believe that his road proved more appropriate to end slavery than either non-resistance or gradualism. That alone makes short shrift of such theories. Historians and others have misinterpreted later events such as the Bolshevik strategy which led to Russian Revolution in October 1917. More recently, we saw this same incomprehension concerning the victory of the Vietnamese against overwhelming military superior forces. Needless to say, all these events continue to be revised by some historians to take the sting out of there proper political implications.


From a modern prospective Brown's strategy for black liberation, even if the abolitionist goal he aspired to was immediately successful reached the outer limits within the confines of capitalism. Brown's actions were meant to make black people free. Beyond that goal he had no program. Unfortunately the Civil War did not provide fundamental economic and political freedom. That is still our fight. Moreover, the Civil War, the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the reign of `Jim Crow' and the subsequent waves of black migration to the cities changed the character of black oppression in the U.S.from Brown's time. Black people are now a part of "free labor," and the key to their liberation is in the integrated fight of labor and its allies to establish a government in the intersts of working people. And as Malcolm X said by whatever means it takes Nevertheless, we can stand proudly in the revolutionary tradition of John Brown (and of his friend Frederick Douglass). We need to complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the Civil War, not by emulating Brown's exemplary actions but to moving the multi-racial American working class to power. We must know our history. Read this book and find out why.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars America's Terrorist Hero, October 14, 2008

By	Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: John Brown (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)

If you want to learn about John Brown's life and thought, and about the context and impact of his raid on Harper's Ferry, you should read historian David. S. Reynolds's "John Brown: Abolitionist", a passionate, dispassionate biography of the man and his times. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote his biography of Brown in 1909, at a time when Jim Crow ruled even the profession of history and when Brown was almost universally scorned as a madman and a fanatic. Du Bois wrote of him as a Promethean hero, the "necessary man' of American history. In doing so, he was not the revisionist. Rather, he was reviving the perception of Brown that had prevailed during the Civil War, the perception cultivated by the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau and by the poets Whitman and Melville. Du Bois's biography is more an eloquent mythic epitaph than a work of simple scholarship. To read it is to understand Du Bois and the demands of African-Americans for respect and social justice, projected onto the one 'white' man of the antebellum Land of the Slave who sincerely shared his humanity with "black" men and women. Du Bois is an eloquent writer; his final chapter, on the Legacy of John Brown, is addressed to the segregationists and colonialists of his own era, but its appeal for justice - sadly - is as pertinent now as then. Here are Du Bois's concluding sentences:

"John Brown taught us that the cheapest price to pay for liberty is its cost today. The building of barriers against the advance of Negro-Americans hinders but in the end cannot altogether stop their progress.... Nor can the efficiency of gree as an economic developer be proven -- it may hasten development but it does so at the expense of solidity of structure, smoothness of motion, and real efficiency. Nor does selfish exploitation help the underdeveloped; rather it hinders and weakens them.
"It is now a full century since this white-hired old man lay weltering in the blood which he spilled for broken and despised humanity. Let the nation which he loved and the South to which he spoke, reverently listen again today to those words, as prophetic now as then:
"'You had better -- all you people of the South -- prepare yourslves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you commence that preparation, the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily -- I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled -- this Negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet.'"