Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Frederick Douglas: Prophet of Freedom (October 2018) is a nonfiction biography of the life of the famed abolitionist, published in 2018 by the American author and historian David W. Blight. Among other awards, it won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History. The book also made the Best Books list for 2018 by the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. The book is categorized as U.S. Abolition of Slavery History and Black & African American History. (All page references in this study guide refer to the 2018 Kindle edition of the book.)

Blight is a professor of history at Yale University who spent much of his life researching Douglass, slavery in America, and the Civil War. He has written other books dealing with this material, including Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) and American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011). Blight also edited an edition of Douglass’s first autobiography. Drawing on Douglass’s newspaper articles, autobiographies, and personal correspondence, the author follows the abolitionist’s life chronologically from his birth in February 1818 to his death in 1895.