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Frederick Douglass is one of the most celebrated writers in the African American literary tradition, and his first autobiography is the one of the most widely read North American slave narratives. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave was published in 1845, less than seven years after Douglass escaped from slavery. The book was an instant success, selling 4,500 copies in the first four months. Throughout his life, Douglass continued to revise and expand his autobiography, publishing a second version in 1855 as My Bondage and My Freedom. The third version of Douglass' autobiography was published in 1881 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, and an expanded version of Life and Times was published in 1892. These various retellings of Douglass' story all begin with his birth and childhood, but each new version emphasizes the mutual influence and close correlation of Douglass' life with key events in American history.
Like many slave narratives, Douglass' Narrative is prefaced with endorsements by white abolitionists. In his preface, William Lloyd Garrison pledges that Douglass's Narrative is "essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated" (p. viii). Likewise, Wendell Phillips pledges "the most entire confidence in [Douglass'] truth, candor, and sincerity" (p. xiv). Though Douglass counted Garrison and Phillips as friends, scholars such as Beth A. McCoy have argued that their letters serve as subtle reminders of white power over the black author and his text. Indeed, in all of his subsequent autobiographies, Douglass replaced Garrison and Phillips' endorsements with introductions by prominent black abolitionists and legal scholars.
Douglass begins his Narrative with what he knows about his birth in Tuckahoe, Maryland—or more precisely, what he does not know. "I have no accurate knowledge of my age," Douglass states; nor can he positively identify his father (p. 1). Douglass notes that it was "whispered that my master was my father . . . [but] the means of knowing was withheld from me" (p. 2). He recalls that he was separated from his mother "before I knew her as my mother," and that he saw her only "four or five times in my life" (p. 2). This separation of mothers from children, and lack of knowledge about age and paternity, Douglass explains, was common among slaves: "it is the wish of most masters . . . to keep their slaves thus ignorant" (p. 1).
As a child on the plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd, Douglass witnesses brutal whippings of various slaves—male and female, old and young. But for the most part, he describes his childhood as a typical or representative story, rather than a unique or individual narrative. "[M]y own treatment . . . was very similar to that of the other slave children," he writes (p. 26). The early chapters of his Narrative emphasize the status of slaves and the nature of slavery over his individual experience. "I had no bed," he writes. "[I would] sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in [a sack for carrying corn] and feet out" (p. 27). This description explicitly links Douglass' experience back to that of the other slaves: "old and young, male and female, married and single, drop down side by side, on one common bed,—the cold, damp floor,—each covering himself or herself with their miserable
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