Additional Praise for Frederick Douglass

“In this stunning biography, David Blight takes on the question that Frederick Douglass sought to answer all his life: How did a runaway slave transform himself into an internationally famous abolitionist, orator, journalist, and diplomat? Astonishing in its breadth and depth, and told with exceptional sensitivity, this account of an epic life that intersected with black freedom and violent white backlash is also a story of rage and forgiveness, loneliness and charisma, bitter discouragement and fervent faith. All the way through this soaring, page-turning book, the piercing wisdom of the extraordinary Douglass echoes and endures into our own troubled century.”

—Martha Hodes, author of Mourning Lincoln

“David Blight’s magnificent book bares the radical fury and inner dilemmas that drove one of the greatest American lives. No scholar has known Frederick Douglass better, or written about him with such emotional as well as historical acuity. It is a biography truly worthy of its eloquent, conflicted, elusive, and heroic subject.”

—Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Princeton University, and author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

“David Blight’s career-long fascination with Frederick Douglass has finally given historians the definitive biography of one of America’s leading prophets of freedom. Blight’s work not only humanizes Douglass, it also reframes our understanding of the nineteenth century through the lens of the life of Frederick Douglass.”

—Lonnie G. Bunch III, Director, National Museum of African American History and Culture

“David Blight’s beautifully written Frederick Douglass uses previously unplumbed archives to give us the deepest portrait yet of one of America’s greatest intellectuals. The radical thinker and revolutionary is revealed here in all his complexity by a gifted and learned historian with an ear for Douglass’s oracular voice and an eye for the tragedies of nineteenth-century America. This is a biography worthy of the man.”

—Wendy Warren, author of New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America

“Good historians make the best biographers. David Blight, one of our finest historians, has skillfully placed Frederick Douglass into his time and place and given us a psychologically penetrating portrait enriched by new details grounded in thorough research. This is the best biography of Douglass ever written, the one Douglass has long deserved.”

—James Oakes, author of The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics

“Never before has Frederick Douglass’s life been portrayed with such scope and authority. The whole arc is here—his endurance of and escape from slavery, his experience of quasi-freedom in the North, his shifting views of how abolition might be achieved, and, after the war was won, his keen awareness that the struggle for full freedom was far from over. David Blight’s probing biography will be indispensable for anyone hoping to understand this towering figure in the central drama of American history.”

—Andrew Delbanco, Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies, Columbia University, and author of The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“There is hardly a more important and symbolic figure in America’s never-ending struggle to get the universal rights we proclaimed at our founding. With his characteristic brilliance, David Blight brings Frederick Douglass to life; no longer is he merely a player in the drama of Afro-American liberation, but the avatar of all of our aspirations and dreams for a truly equal society.”

—Ken Burns