Frederick Douglass: A Biography (Paperback or Softback)

Frederick Douglass: A Biography (1899) is a book by African American author, lawyer, and political activist Charles Chesnutt. While he is more widely known for “The Goophered Grapevine,” the first story published in The Atlantic by an African American author, Chesnutt was also a gifted biographer whose storytelling ability allowed him to present the life of such a man as Frederick Douglass in a fresh and revelatory light. “From this night of slavery Douglass emerged, passed through the limbo of prejudice which he encountered as a freeman, and took his place in history.” Born in Maryland, Douglass escaped slavery at the age of twenty with the help of his future wife Anna Murray Douglass, a free black woman from Baltimore. In New England, he connected with the influential abolitionist community and joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, a historically Black denomination which counted Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman among its members. In 1839, Douglass became a preacher and began his career as a captivating orator on religious, social, and political matters. He met William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, in 1841, and was deeply moved by his passionate abolitionism. As Douglass’ reputation and influence grew, he traveled across the country and eventually to Ireland and Great Britain to advocate on behalf of the American abolitionist movement, winning countless people over to the leading moral cause of the nineteenth century. Arguably one of the most influential Americans of all time, Douglass led a life dedicated to democracy and racial equality. This edition of Charles Chesnutt’s Frederick Douglass: A Biography is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) was an African American author, lawyer, and political activist. Born in Cleveland to a family of “free persons of color” from North Carolina, Chesnutt spent his youth in Ohio before returning to the South after the Civil War. As a teenager, he worked as a teacher at a local school for Black students and eventually became principal at a college established in Fayetteville for the purpose of training Black teachers. Chesnutt married Susan Perry―with whom he had four daughters―in 1878 and moved to New York City for a short time before settling in Cleveland, where he studied law and passed the bar exam in 1887. His story “The Goophered Grapevine,” published the same year, was the first story by an African American to appear in The Atlantic. Back in Ohio, Chesnutt started the court stenography business that would earn him the financial stability to pursue a career as a writer. He wrote several collections of short stories, including The Conjure Woman (1899) and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (1899), both of which explore themes of race in America and African American identity as well as employ African American Vernacular English. Chesnutt was also an active member of the NAACP throughout his life, writing for its magazine The Crisis, serving on its General Committee, and working with such figures as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.