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About the author
American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, author, and statesman Frederick Douglass was also a writer. Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born sometime around February 1817, and he passed away in February 1895. After escaping slavery in Maryland, he rose to prominence as a national figure in the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York. He was well-recognized for his incisive antislavery writings and speeches. Because of this, abolitionists of his era referred to him as a "living refutation" of slaveholders' assertions that slaves lacked the intelligence to live as autonomous citizens of the United States. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a famous orator had formerly been a slave. Douglass was inspired to write his first autobiography by this lack of belief. Frederick Douglass published three autobiographies, the first of which, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), became a bestseller and had a significant impact on advancing the abolitionist movement. His second book, My Bondage, and My Freedom, also detailed his experiences as a slave (1855). After the Civil War, Douglass actively fought for the rights of freed slaves and published Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, his final autobiography.
