For more than five decades, from the antebellum period through the Civil War and Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age, Frederick Douglass used his voice and wielded his pen in support of abolition and emancipation, equal rights, and human dignity, developing a prophetic style suffused with scriptural cadences and a fierce moral urgency. This boxed set gathers both volumes of the Library of America’s definitive edition of his collected writings.

Autobiographies, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., presents all three of Douglass’s landmark memoirs:

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), a powerfully compressed account of the cruelty and oppression of the Maryland plantation culture into which Douglass was born and of his escape to freedom

My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in which Douglass expands the account of his slave years with astonishing psychological penetration

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881 and revised in 1893, recounting Douglass’s efforts to keep alive the struggle for racial equality in the years following the Civil War.

Speeches Writings, edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer David W. Blight, is the largest single-volume edition of Douglass’s writings ever published, presenting 34 speeches and 67 pieces of journalism, among them such classic works as:

“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Douglasss incandescent skewering of the slaveholding republic

“There Was a Right Side in the Late War,” a scathing rebuke of the push to rewrite the history of the Civil War

The still timely “Lessons of the Hour,” about lynching and the emergence of Jim Crow

It includes as a special feature the 1853 novella “The Heroic Slave,” Douglass’s lone work of fiction