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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

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From: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Date: 20010101
Author:William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The epitome of the antebellum fugitive slave narrative, Frederick Douglass's Narrative was published in May 1845 by the American Anti-Slavery Society of Boston. Priced at fifty cents a copy, the Narrative's first printing of five thousand sold out in four months. To satisfy demand, four additional reprintings of two thousand copies each were brought out within a year. By 1850 approximately thirty thousand copies of the Narrative had been sold in the United States and Great Britain. In 1846, a Dutch translation and in 1848, a French ...

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