Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

FREDERICK DOUGLASS was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1818 on a farm in Talbot County, Maryland. Enslaved from birth, he taught himself to read and write as a boy. At age twenty he escaped to Massachusetts with the help of his future wife, Anna Murray, a freeborn black woman. Adopting the surname Douglass (from an exiled nobleman in Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake), he became prominent in the abolitionist movement and in 1845 published the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. It was followed by My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881; rev. 1892). In 1847, a group of British supporters purchased his freedom; five years later, he delivered a fiery address titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” that cemented his reputation as one of the greatest orators of his day. After the Civil War, he moved to Washington, D.C., and served in a succession of government posts. He died there on February 20, 1895. Joshua Bennett is a professor of English at Dartmouth. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction: The Sobbing School (2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award; Being Property Once Myself (2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize; Owed (2020); The Study of Human Life (2022); and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (2023). For his creative writing and scholarship, he has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He lives in Massachusetts.