Authors

The definitive edition of Douglass’s writings is under the editorship of John Blassingame and John R. McKivigan; six volumes have appeared since 1979. The Library of America’s Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, with notes by Henry Louis Gates Jr., contains Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892). William L. Andrews’s The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader (1996) offers an excellent selection and a perceptive introduction. Philip S. Foner edited The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass in five volumes (1950–75). In addition, William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely have edited a Norton Critical Edition of the Narrative (1997). The standard biography is William S. McFeely’s Frederick Douglass (1991), but it should be supplemented by Benjamin Quarles’s excellent Frederick Douglass (1948), Dickson J. Preston’s Young Frederick Douglass (1980), David W. Blight’s Frederick Douglass’s Civil War (1989), and Maria Diedrich’s provocative Love Across the Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (1999). Waldo E. Martin Jr.’s The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1984) offers a full-scale intellectual biography and remains among the best books in Douglass studies. Important essays on Douglass can be found in Eric J. Sundquist’s Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (1990), William L. Andrews’s Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass (1991), and Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland’s Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader (1999). Valuable critical studies include Houston A. Baker Jr.’s The Journey Back (1980) and Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984), William Andrews’s To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (1986), Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993), John Ernest’s Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African- American Literature (1995), Robert S. Levine’s Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997), Maggie M. Sale’s The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (1997), Maurice O. Wallace’s Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (2002), and William Jeremiah Moses’s Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey (2004).

Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Maryland, and even though it was illegal for slaves to become literate, at an early age he managed to learn to read and write. In 1836, after years of moving around among different brutal situations, Douglass escaped. Once north, he joined Anna Murray, a free black woman, and the couple married and adopted new names to minimize the chances of being caught. Douglass soon became an important orator in the abolitionist movement, and with the publication of his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), he became the international spokesperson for emancipation. Moving to Rochester, New York, in 1847, Douglass began publishing the antislavery paper The North Star, later called Frederick Douglass's Weekly and Monthly. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he actively recruited black soldiers to join the Union Army, and when the Union won, he argued for the immediate passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave African American men the right to vote. Douglass's other autobiographies are My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892).