We’ve made available the full text of Benjamin Quarles’s 1960 Introduction to the first modern edition of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Read it now »
No book more vividly explains the horror of American slavery and the emotional impetus behind the antislavery movement than Frederick Douglass’s Narrative. In an introductory essay, Robert B. Stepto reexamines the extraordinary life and achievement of a man who escaped from slavery to become a leading abolitionist and one of America’s most important writers.
The John Harvard Library text reproduces the first edition, published in Boston in 1845.
![Common Reads: First-Year Experience [picture of open book]](/images/badges/common-reads-sidebar.jpg)
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library
I Tatti Renaissance Library
Loeb Classical Library
Murty Classical Library of India