'In one way, 'Blight writes, 'this book is the biography of a voice.' Finding and then raising his voice against slavery, and keeping up the crusade for half a century has assured Douglass's place among in the secular canon of American liberty. He left little room for biographers to improve upon his work.īlight accepts the challenge by choosing a path that focuses on Douglass as a storyteller, and his ability to tell and re-tell his personal story of slavery as a brief against the elaborate economic, social and especially religious infrastructure that supported and condoned slavery. '.the first major problem in writing Douglass's biography is that the subject himself is in the way.'ĭouglass mastered the powerful human drama of telling one's own story in one's own voice. And he acknowledges that he is working against great odds. He was capable of great love and compassion, but perhaps even more desperately in need of receiving love and compassion long into adulthood.'īut as rich a target as Douglass is for a biographer, he presents significant hurdles for anyone interested in chronicling his life: What does one add to the life story of a man who has written three well-regarded autobiographies, and who made it his life's work to explain to America how its cultural and political folklore was in constant and tragic collision with its ugly reality?īlight acquits himself well in this effort, paying a lot of attention to the man even as he burnishes the legend. 'He was forever in search of a sense of home, a concept he dwelled on at length in the autobiographies. 'Douglass's experiences began to shape a disposition, a set of habits of mind, a personality that may have lasted all of his life,' Blight writes.

Blight does not hide his admiration for his subject: 'There is no greater voice of America's transformation from slavery to freedom than Douglass's,' he writes in the early pages.īut Blight understands the very high bar he set for himself by choosing to write about a man who is most famous for writing so eloquently about his own life.īlight succeeds in painting a portrait of Douglass that explains his monumental public achievements as well and his personal charms and shortcomings.Īnd maybe the greatest value of Blight's book is that it manages to position the singular individual personality that is Frederick Douglass in perfect relation to, and conflict with, the monumental societal injustices that both formed and animated the abolitionist. In Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, author and historian David W. That so many of the problems Douglass identified and confronted 150 years ago remain difficult, urgent and unresolved today only adds to the allure of the story. The scourge of slavery the grace of individual liberty the sanctity of the Constitution, women's suffrage the transformative power of equal opportunity the moral decency of the America experiment: All of this mythology threads its way through Douglass's life in contentious and illuminating ways that reflect the racial and political tensions that consumed the country then.

How?įrederick Douglass continues to be an irresistible subject for biographers because all of the nation's difficult, miraculous, unresolved creation myths seem to collapse into the single story of his life. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Frederick Douglass Subtitle Prophet of Freedom Author David W.

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