Frederick Douglass Library Guide: Writings by Douglass

Published in 1845, this autobiography powerfully details the life of the internationally famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass from his birth into slavery in 1818 to his escape to the North in 1838 - how he endured the daily physical and spiritual brutalities of his owners and drivers, how he learned to read and write, and how he grew into a man who could only live free or die. In his introduction, Houston A. Baker, Jr., discusses the slave narrative as a distinct American literary genre and points out its social, political, historical, and literary significance, past and present.

Douglass wrote this autobiography which was published in 1855. Douglass was born in Maryland and separated from his mother when he was an infant. Some scholars think he was descendant from American Muslins. When he was 12 his owner's wife broke the law by teaching him to read. The neighborhood children helped him with his reading and writing. As a teenager he spent a few years with a farmer known to be a slave breaker. He later obtained his freedom and became a well-known abolitionist.

The autobiography of the former slave who became an advisor to Presidents. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881, records Douglass' efforts to keep alive the struggle for racial equality in the years following the Civil War. Now a socially and politically prominent figure, he looks back, with a mixture of pride and bitterness; on the triumphs and humiliations of a unique public career.

Extracted from the North Star, September 8, 1848.

In the Words of Frederick Douglass is a rich trove of quotations from Douglass. The editors have compiled nearly seven hundred quotations by Douglass that demonstrate the breadth and strength of his intellect as well as the eloquence with which he expressed his political and ethical principles. See book trailer.

Douglass' strongly held views in support of absolute equality for women are well represented by a collection of speeches, some previously published in journals and others taken directly from manuscripts at the Library of Congress. "He was the only man I ever saw who understood the degradation of the disfranchisement of women," said Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the pioneer of the American woman's rights movement.

One of the greatest African American leaders and one of the most brilliant minds of his time, Frederick Douglass spoke and wrote with unsurpassed eloquence on almost all the major issues confronting the American people during this life -- from the abolition of slavery to women's rights, from the Civil War to lynching, from American patriotism to black nationalism. But no substantial one-volume collection of his speeches and writings has ever been published before now. Between 1950 and 1975, Philip S Foner collected the most important of Douglass's hundreds of speeches, letters, articles and editorials into an impressive five-volume set, now long out of print. Abridged, adapted, and supplemented with several important texts that Foner did not include, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings presents the most significant, insightful, and elegant short works of Douglass's massive oeuvre.

Collects in one volume the most outstanding and representative works from Frederick Douglass's fifty year writing career, including the classic texts Narrative of the Life of an American Slave (1845), and The Heroic Slave (1853) in their entirety, as well as notable examples of Douglass's journalism, oratory, and fiction. Offers the most complete, diverse, and personally revealing account available of nineteenth-century black America's most celebrated writer.

This first series, five volumes of Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, was completed in 1992 and praised in The Journal of American History as “an important resource for Douglass scholars as well as all those interested in unraveling the intricate web of nineteenth-century reform.