Frederick Douglass’s Foray into Fiction: Considering the Context of Recent Work on The Heroic Slave

Abstract

In February 2015, the Frederick Douglass Papers, a documentary editing project at work since 1973 to collect, edit, and disseminate the various works of Frederick Douglass, the most influential African American of the 19th century, published the first-ever scholarly edition of Douglass’s sole work of fiction, his 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave. Edited by Robert S. Levine of the University of Maryland, John Stauffer of Harvard University, and John McKivigan, the longtime editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers, based since 1998 at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), and published by the Yale University Press, The Critical and Cultural Edition of The Heroic Slave provides, for the first time, an authoritative text, along with assorted contemporary and scholarly documents to help readers engage the novella in its historical, biographical, and literary contexts. Those documents assist readers to better understand what Douglass chose to emphasize and leave out in his telling of the story of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole. The Heroic Slave has emerged as a major text in Douglass’s canon, a novella that continues to fascinate readers with its compelling vision of reform, black revolution, and the quest for human freedom.