By Simon & Schuster
As a young man, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time.
In this remarkable biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historians have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. Douglass was not only an astonishing man of words, but a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology. There has not been a major biography of Douglass in a quarter century. David Blight’s Frederick Douglass affords this important American the distinguished biography he deserves.
“David Blight’s incandescent Frederick Douglass is a monumental achievement of biographical empathy,” blurbs David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. “A much-awaited masterpiece of a life.”
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“A stunning achievement. Blight captures an icon in full humanity.”
– Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963.
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Audio excerpt:
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Blight teaser:
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Comments welcome.
Posted on October 22, 2018