Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

The pathbreaking autobiography of America’s most influential abolitionist and former slave, now with an introduction from Pulitzer Prize–winning Douglass biographer David W. Blight

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818 on a farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He lived in bondage for two decades, experiencing nearly every brutal treatment, physical and psychological, that a young slave could face—but he also learned to read, a key that would unlock his freedom, even as he was tormented by a fuller understanding of his inhumane fate.

At age twenty, in a cunning and brave plot hatched with a few friends and his intrepid fiancée, Douglass escaped from slavery by train, steamer, and ferryboat over some thirty-eight hours to New York City, disguised as a sailor. His story is one of great drama and risk in the face of what he called the “prison” and the “tomb” of slavery. But in recollecting these events, Douglass also left us an illegal refugee-immigrant’s language of fear and courage, and forged the greatest of American slave narratives.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is at once a coming-of-age story of violent redemption, and a work of prose poetry about the quintessentially American crisis of slavery and freedom in an expanding republic. One hundred eighty years on from its initial publication, and presented here for the Modern Library Founding Documents series with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David W. Blight, Douglass’s “soul’s complaint” lives as sublimely now as ever.