The Frederick Douglass Collection: A Library of America Boxed Set (Library of America: The Frederick Douglass Collection) Hardcover – December 26, 2023 9781598537697

For more than five decades, from the antebellum period through the Civil War and Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age, Frederick Douglass used his voice and wielded his pen in support of abolition and emancipation, equal rights, and human dignity, developing a prophetic style suffused with scriptural cadences and a fierce moral urgency. This deluxe boxed set gathers both volumes of the Library of America’s definitive edition of his collected writings.

Autobiographies, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., presents all 3 of Douglass’s landmark memoirs:

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), a powerfully compressed account of the cruelty and oppression of the Maryland plantation culture into which Douglass was born and of his escape to freedom
• My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in which Douglass expands the account of his slave years with astonishing psychological penetration
• Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881 and revised in 1893, recounting Douglass’s efforts to keep alive the struggle for racial equality in the years following the Civil War.

Speeches & Writings, edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer David W. Blight, is the largest single-volume edition of Douglass’s writings ever published, presenting 34 speeches and 67 pieces of journalism, among them such classic works as:

• “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Douglass’s incandescent skewering of the slaveholding republic
• “There Was a Right Side in the Late War,” a scathing rebuke of the push to rewrite the history of the Civil War
• The still timely “Lessons of the Hour,” about lynching and the emergence of Jim Crow
• It includes as a special feature the 1853 novella “The Heroic Slave,” Douglass’s lone work of fiction

This collector’s boxed set is the ultimate introduction to a figure whose historical significance continues to grow.