Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, February 1818 - 1895) was an African-American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American...

This dramatic autobiography of the early life of an American slave was first published in 1845, when its young author had just achieved his freedom. Douglass' eloquence gives a clear indication of the powerful principles that led him to become the first great African-American leader in the United States. The personal account of a fugitive slave's privation and sufferings and his campaigns for Negro emancipation. This dramatic autobiography of the...

Frederick Douglass was, born in slavery as, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, near Easton in Talbot County, Maryland. He was not sure of the exact year of his birth, but he knew that it was 1817 or 1818. As a young boy, he was, sent to Baltimore, to be a house servant, where he learned to read and write, with the assistance of his master's wife. In 1838, he escaped from slavery and went to New York City, where he married Anna Murray, a free colored...

Raised as a plantation slave who was taught to read and write by one of his owners, Frederick Douglass became a brilliant writer, eloquent orator, and major participant in the stuggle of African-Americans for freedom and equality. In this engrossing, first-hand narrative originally published in 1845, he vividly recounts early years of physical abuse, deprivation and tragedy; his dramatic escape to the North and eventual freedom, abolitionist campaigns,...

"The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader 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 Reader contains the following classic texts in their entirety: the landmark fugitive slave narrative Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845); the consummate anti-slavery...

Collects three novels, including "The Heroic Slave" which provides a fictional account of the rebellion led by Madison Washington on the slave ship "Creole;" "Clotel" which chronicles the experiences of the author who was an African-American slave born in Lexington, Kentucky; and "Our Nig" in which the author uses her own experiences to relate the fictitious story about the struggles of Frado, the daughter of a white mother and black father.