My Bondage and My Freedom: The Givens Collection Classics

My Bondage and My Freedom is the second of three published autobiographies from one of the most brilliant and eloquent abolitionists and human rights activists in American history. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was published ten years before in 1845, while The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass was published twenty-five years later.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave and escaped to freedom in his twenties. My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) was written after he had established himself as a newspaper editor. In this book, Douglass expands upon his previous accounts of his years as a slave. With great psychological penetration, he probes the long-term and corrosive effects of slavery and comments upon his active resistance to the segregation he encounters in the North.