Assessing Frederick Douglass’s 1853 Novella The Heroic Slave

Abstract

In summer 2014 the Frederick Douglass Papers, a unit of the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at Indianapolis’s Institute of American Thought published the first-ever scholarly edition of Douglass’s sole work of fiction, his 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave. With the support of the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute, the Indiana University New Currents Program, a number of campus units, and Indiana Humanities, a scholarly symposium, "Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave and the American Revolutionary Tradition," was held on the IUPUI campus on October 9 and 10, 2014 to observe this event and to reassess the historical and literary significance of The Heroic Slave. The two-day symposium was organized by John R. Kaufman-McKivigan, Editor of the Douglass Papers, and Bessie House-Soremekun, Chair of the IUPUI Africana Studies Program. Nine internationally recognized scholars in the disciplines of history, literature, and Africana Studies attended this two-day event and presented original research on Douglass, utilizing the new Yale University Press edition of The Heroic Slave. Kaufman- McKivigan of the Douglass Papers and symposium participant Professor Jane Schultz of the IUPUI English Department will edit these papers and provide appropriate accompanying apparatus for a special issue of the Journal of African American History to be published sometime in late 2016. The symposium and the journal issue will become a valuable new addition to the expanding scholarship on Frederick Douglass’s central role in the nineteenth-century African American experience.