Frederick Douglass

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews the writing style of Frederick Douglass's autobiography. It offers a brief summary with quotation from the text and discusses the nineteenth century American history in context.

From the Paper:

"As Frederick Douglass's Narrative states, he was born a slave on the huge Wye Plantation in southern Maryland. The plantation was owned by a Captain Anthony, the white man who may, in fact, according to the Narrative, have been Douglass's own father as well. Douglass himself was told only that his father had been a white man. However, he never learned his father's actual identity. Douglass describes, in view of this, how, symbolically, his identity always felt incomplete. Douglass's autobiography relates how, as a young man seeking freedom, he ran away first to the North, and then to England (when he was, ironically, already a well-known author and speaker worldwide, but still a slave) in order to at last escape the bonds of slavery. Again ironically, as Douglass's Narrative states, it was the English who bought his freedom while Douglass was living, writing, and lecturing in Great Britain. It was only then that Douglass could return to America a free man (Frederick Douglass: When the Lion Wrote History)."

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