It is a stunning and poignant moment. “All great autobiography is about loss, about the hopeless but necessary quest to retrieve and control a past that forever slips away,’’ Blight observes.

He wrote to Benjamin Auld, a son of his former owner, asking for any information about his father and his actual age. Even in the last year of his life, Douglass struggled to possess the uncertainty of his beginnings. In some ways, with each book, Douglass sought to possess a life that initially was not his to have and, in doing so, he wrote himself into existence. The last, “ Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,’’ offers a look over his life’s journey as he, among other things, lists his accomplishments and recalls his friends and connections. “ My Bondage and My Freedom,’’ the second installment and perhaps the most powerful of the three, is also the most political and reflects Douglass’s rage and the tumult of the 1850s. In one sense, Douglass’s fight against slavery involved an act of self-creation, with his literary pen one of his primary tools.Įach of his autobiographies serves as an anchor in the book. The early “ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave’’ gives us the young, ambitious Douglass. His is a journey from radical outsider to political insider, a prophet whose fires cooled as he aged, gained famed, and acquired access to the corridors of power. What surfaces is a powerful and flawed human being. We see him struggling to create himself under the conditions of slavery, waging war against the peculiar institution with words and action, raging against “the infinite manifestations of racism” (what Douglass called our “national faith”), and remaining a loyal partisan of the Republican Party until the day his heart gave out in 1895 at age 77. The resulting chronicle enriches our understanding of Douglass and the challenges he faced and offers a lesson for our own troubled times. Evans, Blight sheds light on the final 30 years of Douglass’s life in ways we have never seen.

And now with unprecedented access to a trove of material gathered by African-American art collector Walter O. The Yale historian wrote his dissertation on him. Blight, considered a leading authority on the slavery period, has been thinking about Douglass for over 35 years. With extraordinary detail he illuminates the complexities of Douglass’s life and career and paints a powerful portrait of one of the most important American voices of the 19th century. David Blight has written the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass.

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