Name: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Author: Frederick Douglass

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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

by Frederick Douglass

Category: Biography

Status: Available

Source: Public Domain — Project Gutenberg

About This Book

"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" by Frederick Douglass is a memoir written in 1845. This powerful firsthand account chronicles Douglass's experiences in bondage and his determination to gain freedom. From his early separation from his mother to brutal physical abuse under various masters, Douglass recounts the dehumanizing realities of slavery. His secret pursuit of literacy becomes a turning point, opening his mind to the possibility of escape and fueling his journey toward liberation and self-determination. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

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Narrative of the Life of FREDERICK DOUGLASS

AN AMERICAN SLAVE. WRITTEN BY HIMSELF.

BOSTON

PUBLISHED AT THE ANTI-SLAVERY OFFICE, NO. 25 CORNHILL 1845

ENTERED, ACCORDING TO ACT OF CONGRESS, IN THE YEAR 1845 BY FREDERICK DOUGLASS, IN THE CLERK’S OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS.

Note from the original file: This electronic book is being released at this time to honor the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. [Born January 15, 1929] [Officially celebrated January 20, 1992]

Contents

PREFACE

In the month of August, 1841, I attended an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket, at which it was my happiness to become acquainted with Frederick Douglass, the writer of the following Narrative. He was a stranger to nearly

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About This Edition

This edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass is catalogued on Libreya under Biography and runs approximately 40,747 words — about 204 minutes of reading at an average pace. It is sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library of public domain literature, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, and every text on Libreya has been verified to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. You can view the original Project Gutenberg edition here.

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About Classic Biography

Biography is one of the oldest and most direct forms of literature — the attempt to render a human life with honesty, precision, and narrative shape. The great biographies and autobiographies of the literary tradition offer something that no other form can: direct access to the interior experience of people who shaped history, science, art, and thought. Autobiographical works like Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life offer not just facts but the texture of a lived experience — how the world looked from inside a particular consciousness at a particular moment in history. Classic biographical writing also includes portraits of great figures by those who knew them well, and these accounts carry an immediacy and particularity that later histories often lack. Reading biography is to practice a form of empathy at scale: to inhabit, however temporarily, a life very different from one's own, and to understand from the inside what it meant to live, think, and act in another time and place.