Frederick Douglass was and remains one of the most recognizable figures from the nineteenth-century United States. He was among the “most photographed” people of his day and among the world’s most gifted writers and orators. His life was characterized by a constant process of movement, change, and reinvention, and his autobiographies reflect his ongoing interest in self-definition, history, and memory. Douglass wrote and published three autobiographies, beginning with his most famous autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845). Douglass’s first autobiography positions him in the mold of a self-made man. He also outlines in painful detail how enslavement and race subjugation are processes maintained by brutal violence. No one is born a slave, and enslavers required an entire national culture to maintain the bloody system. “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man,” Douglass famously declares.

Later readers have marked the notable absence of Douglass’s family from his autobiography, including his grandmother and siblings, and his wife, Anna Murray Douglass, who facilitated his escape from enslavement. Subsequent autobiographies expand on some of Douglass’s earlier life, but they shine most brightly on his growth as an intellectual and as an activist. Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and my Freedom (1855), articulates his break from the white antislavery establishment. In his introduction to the book, fellow Black activist and friend James McCune Smith declares: “It is an American book, for Americans, in the fullest sense of the idea. It shows that the worst of our institutions, in its worst aspect, cannot keep down energy, truthfulness, and earnest struggle for the right.” Douglass’s final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), went through several editions and expansions and covers Douglass’s life through his role as U.S. Ambassador to Haiti.