This is the first annotated edition of a work Eric J. Sundquist has called ''a classic text of the American Renaissance.'' As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has pointed out, My Bondage and My Freedom has been largely ignored by critics, in part because it is longer and less accessible than Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass but also because it has not up to now been ''read'' by a sensitive critic. ''The latter reason is paramount and urgently needed to be addressed, and William Andrews is just the person to introduce Douglass's second autobiography to our generation of readers. He has few peers in nineteenth-century black criticism.''''Andrews's splendid introduction is the best essay on My Bondage and My Freedom and, indeed, on Douglass that I have read. It should gain for My Bondage and My Freedom the stature this book has so long deserved and so long been denied. Not merely the tale of a runaway slave written, remarkably, by a black man, it is a classic of American literature.''--William S. McFeely, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning biography of Ulysses S. Grant and of the biography of Frederick Douglass
