Douglass’s story was unique among slave narratives of the period, not because it followed one man’s path from ignorant bondage to literate freedom, but because his depiction of this journey insisted, more than any other before or since, on the connection between literacy and wisdom, between man’s physical freedom and his liberty to think for himself. In Douglass we watch not only the liberation of an American slave, but also the formation of an American consciousness.

In reviewing David W. Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, Finnegan Schick describes the difficulty of writing a biography of this man who wrote much of his own story and lived five distinct lives. The real Frederick Douglass was “mercurial, contradictory, and always facing his readers.”

“His life,” Schick said, “was a constant performance of self-invention and reinvention.” He recommends this book as what will likely be the best Douglass biography available for years.

One cannot look for a better guide through Douglass than Blight—himself a master orator and one of Yale’s last great lecturers—who is equally attuned to the beauty of Douglass’s language and the depth of his thought. Blight seeks to balance “the narrative of his life with analyses of his evolving mind, to give his ideas a central place in his unforgettable story.”