The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader collects in one volume the most outstanding and representative work of Frederick Douglass's fifty-year writing career, including all the major genres in which he worked: autobiography, journalism, oratory, and fiction. The Reader contains the following classic texts in their entirety: the landmark fugitive slave narrative Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845); the consummate antislavery oration "What To The Slave Is The Fourth of July?" (1852); the pioneering novella The Heroic Slave (1853); and the magisterial analysis of lynching The Lessons of the Hour (1894). Generous selections from Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), illustrate his boldly revisionist personal and political agenda, while major chapters from both the 1881 and the 1892 editions of the final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, reveal the author's perspective on his own successes and his estimate of the nation's progress on