My Bondage and My Freedom is an autobiographical slave narrative written by Frederick Douglass and published in 1855. It is the second of three autobiographies written by Douglass, and is mainly an expansion of his first, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The book depicts in greater detail his transition from bondage to liberty. Following this liberation, Douglass went on to become a prominent abolitionist, speaker, author, and advocate for women's rights.
The book included an introduction by James McCune Smith, who Douglass called the "foremost black influence" of his life.[1]
See also
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Douglass's first slave narrative memoir.
- The Heroic Slave, a Heartwarming Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington, in Pursuit of Liberty, (1852), a novella by Douglass based on the experiences of Madison Washington.
- Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892), Douglass's last autobiography.
References
Further reading
- Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2011, pp. 60–63. ISBN 978-0-8147-8708-3
- Chaney, Michael A. "Picturing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom as Auto(Bio)Ethnography." African American Review 35.3 (2001): 391–408.
- Richardson, Mark. The Wings of Atalanta: Essays Written Along the Color Line (pages 21–72). Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2019. ISBN 9781571132390
- Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-674-00645-3 (alk. paper)
- Trafton, Scott Driskell. Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania. New Americanists. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8223-3362-7
External links
Works related to My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) at Wikisource- My Bondage and My Freedom, publicly available e-text at the University of Virginia.
- My Bondage and My Freedom, publicly available at Project Gutenberg.
