Product Description

collects in one volume the most outstanding and representative work from Frederick Douglass's fifty-year writing career, including all the major genres in which he worked: autobiography, journalism, oratory, and fiction. The contains the following classic texts in their entirety: the landmark fugitive slave narrative (1845); the consummate anti-slavery oration "What To the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (1852); the pioneering novella (1853); and the magisterial analysis of lynching (1894). Generous selections from Douglass's second autobiography, (1855), illustrate his boldly revisionist personal and political agenda, while major chapters from both the 1881 and the 1892 editions of the final autobiography, , reveal the author's perspective on his own successes and his estimate of the nation's progress on the racial front in the post-war era. Also included are notable examples of Douglass's journalism, in which he advocated women's rights and black enlistment in the Civil War. In addition, the private as well as the public Douglass finds a voice in the , as he responds to criticism of his decision to choose a white woman as his second wife and also discloses his carefully guarded views of religion through a little-known 1886 letter.

Editor William L. Andrews has provided an introduction and headnotes that give basic, accessible information regarding Douglass's life, writing purposes, and the reception of his texts, offering a thoughtful review of the crucial developments in Douglass's multiple careers as autobiographer, journalist, lecturer, and racial spokesman. provides students and readers with the most complete, diverse, and personally revealing record available of nineteenth-century black America's most celebrated writer.