One of the most important figures in the American civil rights movement, Frederick Douglass was a major influence on social and political thought in the nineteenth century. His autobiographical writings were a powerful vehicle for his philosophy of human equality.
Written ten years after his legal emancipation in 1846, My Bondage and My Freedom recounts Douglass’s journey—intellectual, spiritual, and geographical—from life as a slave under various masters, and his many plots and attempts at escape, to his liberation, time as a fugitive, and new life as a prominent abolitionist. Expanding on his earlier work Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, this later memoir illuminates Douglass’s maturation as a writer and thinker.