Volume 15, Number 10 · December 3, 1970
Killing for Freedom
By Willie Lee Rose
To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown
by Stephen B. Oates
Harper & Row, 420 pp., $10.00
John Brown: The Making of a Revolutionary
Edited and Introduced by Louis Ruchames
Grosset & Dunlap, 307 pp., $2.95 (paper)
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
Edited and Abridged by Genevieve S. Gray
Grosset & Dunlap, 181 pp., $4.50
Frederick Douglass
by Philip S. Foner
Citadel, 434 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Frederick Douglass
by Benjamin Quarles, Preface by James McPherson
Atheneum, 350 pp., $3.25 (paper)
My Bondage and My Freedom
by Frederick Douglass, Introduction by Philip Foner
Dover, 464 pp., $3.50 (paper)
Black Abolitionists
by Benjamin Quarles
Oxford, 292 pp., $6.95
Biographers of men who lived in violent times have the special problem of dealing with the abstractions about means and ends that clutter the rhetoric of political systems in a state of polarization. When do men mean what they say? How a biographer's subject responds to a call to action may come as near as anything else to exposing the inner quality of the man, the elusive combination of impulse, emotion practicality, and reason that we call character. The recent publication in paperback of the two standard biographies of Frederick Douglass, the first written in 1948 by Benjamin Quarles, and the second in 1950 by Philip Foner, who edited Douglass's writings at the same time, invites a reconsideration of this dynamic editor and orator, America's most important black abolitionist, who lived in violent times.
Review, 4856 words
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