Fans pick 100 books like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

This early American novel starts off with an episode of human spontaneous combustion, followed by repeated episodes of characters hearing disembodied voices.

Brown’s novel uses these Gothic devices and a couple of real-life murder cases to explore religious and political issues that preoccupied Americans in the years after the Revolution. How do we know whether we’re really being guided by reason? What is the basis of authority?

Most editions of Wieland include Brown’s prequel Memoirs of Carwin, which complicates the story by placing one of the main characters in an Illuminati-like organization. American Gothic literature pretty much starts here.  

Hawthorne’s House has a little of everything: mystery, romance, the supernatural, family treachery, and a surprising dose of humor.

A family curse, dating back to the days of New England witch trials, hangs over a present-day (1850s) land dispute, pitting strange but lovable Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon against their scheming, powerful cousin Jaffrey.

While much of the Gothic plot concerns the way the past controls the present, the novel also involves technologies that will help shape the future: photography (which is linked here to spiritualism) and, in one memorable scene, the railroad.

The popularity of the book and its 1940 film adaptation helped make the house that inspired Hawthorne a tourist attraction (which I also highly recommend) in Salem, Massachusetts.

This book might as well have been named The Mysteries of Philadelphia. It was the first American City Mysteries novel. Again, we see a plethora of good and bad characters and mysterious events occurring that many of the characters do not understand because criminals and a secret society manipulate innocent citizens.

My favorite part of the novel is the character Bug, who appears less than human. Another striking moment is a prophetic vision in which “Sodom” is destroyed and Independence Hall is in ruins, symbolizing how the birthplace of independence has failed to live up to the American Revolution’s ideals. The author, George Lippard, who was a friend of Edgar Allan Poe, offers a dark social critique of 1840s America.

Dickinson isn’t always Gothic, but many of her best and best-known poems revolve around that central Gothic question: what is it like to be dead?

Poems beginning with lines like “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” “If I may have it, when it’s Dead,” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” play along the boundary between the living and the dead and ask uncomfortable questions about the afterlife, such as whether there is one.

It’s surely no coincidence that her creative peak coincided with the Civil War. But what makes Dickinson so compelling, for me at least, is her unique vocabulary, which suggests fears and other (sometimes ecstatic) emotions that no one else has managed to describe. Her poems are full of surprise and mystery.

This edition reproduces Dickinson’s own collections of her poems—“fascicles” or homemade books—giving… show more.

Written at a time when the racist belief that Black authors could not be trusted to write African-American history was still prevalent even in the upper echelons of academia, this deft 1948 portrait of Douglass launched the career of Benjamin Quarles, the pioneering African-American historian whose body of work (including The Negro in the American Revolution and Lincoln and the Negro) transformed thinking about the role African-Americans played in the formation of the United States.

The author and I live near each other and we got to know each other at local writer events. So when I heard that her book won Lee and Low’s New Voices Award, I just had to get Glenda’s book. And I did! She autographed a copy for me which I treasure. This is a tender, powerful, and inspiring picture book. It tells the true story of how Frederick Douglass’s mother would visit him. He was a young child working on a plantation. His mother lived and worked six miles away. At night, she would walk six miles through the dark woods to come to visit Frederick, then head back home before dawn. He knew his mother loved him—it was a love that stretched 12 miles long.

This is just a great book by a great author and great illustrator. It’s about the amazing and inspiring friendship of two of the most important men in the history of America. It compares and contrasts different stages of different ages of both these men and gives us a glimpse into the story behind the story of their deep friendship. Every child (and adult) should read this timeless story today.

I was thrilled when I read this book, the first one I found that cited Frederick Douglass’s little-known 1865 eulogy of Lincoln describing him as “emphatically the black man’s president.”

Historians often cited Douglass’s well-known 1876 speech (where he called Lincoln “preeminently the white man’s president”) but ignored the eulogy that I had discovered in Douglass’s papers at the Library of Congress. In vain I had long tried to call scholars’ attention to it.

So when I read this book I immediately wrote the author, thanking him and praising his work. We became fast friends, enthusiasts for opera as well as history. This book shows how Lincoln and Douglass started out from different political positions but moved together over time. Like Douglass Lincoln was “at bottom a racial egalitarian.”  

I read a lot, and this book always shows up in my top five all-time favorites.

Lovingly written, Blight draws a compelling picture of a complex, endlessly fascinating human being. I love the power of Douglass’s words and voice. In my opinion, this is a great book about the man who arguably may be the greatest African American our country has produced. He was a voice for social justice in a time and place where speaking up brought real physical risk. 

While writing a paper about Douglass in graduate school in the 1990s, I learned that he had to overcome two obstacles to establishing an authentic voice in his own book.

First, abolitionists argued against slavery by claiming it dehumanized the slave. While that could be true, this theory could not account for charismatic Black writers like Douglass who were anything but dehumanized. Second, slave narratives in the antebellum era often followed a certain formula that limited the narrator’s originality.

In one striking passage in the Narrative, Douglass overcomes both restrictions by evoking an image of his body that offers visual testimony to creatively push back on these limiting conventions: “My feet have been so cracked with the frost [felt during cold nights during enslavement], that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.”