For the first time in a deluxe collector's boxed set, the definitive edition of the writings of the great African American freedom fighter, including all 3 of his classic memoirs and the best of his impassioned speeches and journalism
For more than five decades, from the antebellum period through the Civil War and Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age, Frederick Douglass used his voice and wielded his pen in support of abolition and emancipation, equal rights, and human dignity, developing a prophetic style suffused with scriptural cadences and a fierce moral urgency. This deluxe boxed set gathers both volumes of the Library of America's definitive edition of his collected writings.
Autobiographies, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., presents all 3 of Douglass's landmark memoirs:
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), a powerfully compressed account of the cruelty and oppression of the Maryland plantation culture into which Douglass was born and of his escape to freedom
- My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in which Douglass expands the account of his slave years with astonishing psychological penetration
- Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881 and revised in 1893, recounting Douglass's efforts to keep alive the struggle for racial equality in the years following the Civil War.
Speeches & Writings, edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David W. Blight, is the largest single-volume edition of Douglass's writings ever published, presenting 34 speeches and 67 pieces of journalism, among them such classic works as:
- "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?," Douglass's incandescent skewering of the slaveholding republic
- "There Was a Right Side in the Late War," a scathing rebuke of the push to rewrite the history of the Civil War
- The still timely "Lessons of the Hour," about lynching and the emergence of Jim Crow
- It includes as a special feature the 1853 novella "The Heroic Slave," Douglass's lone work of fiction
This collector's boxed set is the ultimate introduction to a figure whose historical significance continues to grow.
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was born Frederick Bailey in eastern Maryland, the son of an enslaved mother and an unknown white man. In 1838 he escaped to the North and took the name Douglass. During the next decade he became an antislavery speaker, achieved international fame with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the first of his three autobiographies, and began publishing a series of newspapers. Douglass continued his impassioned advocacy for freedom and racial equality until the end of his life.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard. He is the author of numerous books, including
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, and has produced, written, and hosted an array of documentary films for public television, including
Finding Your Roots and
The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.
David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University and the author of
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of American Freedom, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. His other works include
Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee and
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.
