"No one working on Douglass should leave home without a copy of this book."—from the foreword by David W. Blight, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

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.

With a new foreword by renowned Douglass scholar David W. Blight, Dickson J. Preston’s 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. Astounding his white contemporaries with his oratorical brilliance and intellectual capabilities, Douglass dared to challenge the doctrine of white supremacy on its own grounds. 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.

Dickson J. Preston (1914–1985) worked for more than thirty years as a newspaper reporter and editor. He lived in Talbot County on Maryland's Eastern Shore, not far from the birthplace of Frederick Douglass. David W. Blight is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, and the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.