Drawing on previously untapped sources, Young Frederick Douglass recreates with fidelity and in convincing detail the background and early life of the man who was to become "the gadfly of America's conscience" and the undisputed spokesman for nineteenth-century black Americans.

This highly regarded biography traces the life and times of Frederick Douglass from his birth on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1818 until 1838, when he escaped from slavery to emerge upon the national scene. At the time of Douglass's death in 1895, one eulogist wrote that he was probably the best-known American throughout the world since Abraham Lincoln.