The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader

Frederick Douglass

Oxford University Press, 1996 - Biography & Autobiography - 368 pages

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 oration "What To the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (1852); the pioneering novella The Heroic Slave (1853); and the magisterial analysis of lynching Lessons of the Hour (1894). Generous selections from Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), illustrate his boldly revisionist personal and political agenda, while major chapters from both the 1881 and the 1892 editions of the final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 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 Reader, 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. The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader provides students and readers with the most complete, diverse, and personally revealing record available of nineteenth-century black America's most celebrated writer.

About the author

Born a slave in Maryland in about 1817, Frederick Douglass never became accommodated to being held in bondage. He secretly learned to read, although slaves were prohibited from doing so. He fought back against a cruel slave-breaker and finally escaped to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1838 at about the age of 21. Despite the danger of being sent back to his owner if discovered, Douglass became an agent and eloquent orator for the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. He lectured extensively in both England and the United States. As an ex-slave, his words had tremendous impact on his listeners. In 1845 Douglass wrote his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which increased his fame. Concerned that he might be sent back to slavery, he went to Europe. He spent two years in England and Ireland speaking to antislavery groups. Douglass returned to the United States a free man and settled in Rochester, New York, where he founded a weekly newspaper, The North Star, in 1847. In the newspaper he wrote articles supporting the antislavery cause and the cause of human rights. He once wrote, "The lesson which [the American people] must learn, or neglect to do so at their own peril, is that Equal Manhood means Equal Rights, and further, that the American people must stand for each and all for each without respect to color or race." During the Civil War, Douglass worked for the Underground Railroad, the secret route of escape for slaves. He also helped recruit African-Americans soldiers for the Union army. After the war, he continued to write and to speak out against injustice. In addition to advocating education for freed slaves, he served in several government posts, including United States representative to Haiti. In 1855, a longer version of his autobiography appeared, and in 1895, the year of Douglass's death, a completed version was published. A best-seller in its own time, it has since become available in numerous editions and languages. William L. Andrews was born in 1946. He earned his B.A. from Davidson College in 1968. He received his M.A. in 1970 and Ph.D. in 1973, respectively, from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he is currently the E. Maynard Adams Professor of English. His first book, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, published in 1980, deals with a seminal figure in the development of African American and Southern American prose fiction. While researching To Tell a Free Story, a history of African American autobiography up to 1865, Andrews became greatly interested in autobiography studies. Since 1988 he has been the general editor of a book series, titled Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography, which is published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Since the mid-1980's he has done a considerable amount of editing of African American and southern literature and criticism. The fruition of this work has been The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, published in 1997, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, also published in 1997, and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, three big collaborative projects that Andrews has co-edited. He went on to be the series editor of North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920, a complete digitized library of autobiographies and biographies of North American slaves and ex-slaves, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ameritech, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader; The Oxford reader
• Author: Frederick Douglass
• Editor: William L. Andrews
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1996
• ISBN: 0195091183, 9780195091182
• Length: 368 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / African American & Black; Biography & Autobiography / General; History / United States / General; Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / General; Literary Collections / American / African American & Black; Literary Criticism / General; Social Science / Black Studies (Global); Social Science / Slavery