Douglass's first autobiography recounts his childhood and youth in slavery in Maryland, his self-education in defiance of the ban on teaching enslaved people to read, and his resolve to escape to freedom. Written while he was still legally a fugitive, it named names and places to prove the account was his own, and it became the most celebrated of all the American slave narratives — a foundational text of abolitionist literature and of African American letters.
Author: Frederick Douglass · Original publisher: Anti-Slavery Office, Boston, 1845
