This book is the deeply moving and stirring story of Frederick Douglass's life--as a slave, and as a free man. Douglass wrote three autobiographies, of which the 1855 edition is the most detailed on his life as a slave. In it, the reader is not spared the fullest and most graphic description of the cruel and inhuman treatment of slaves, and the total disregard for them as human beings. Beginning with his earliest childhood, he describes the painful separation from his grandmother; slave life on a Maryland plantation; the excitement and danger of teaching himself how to read and write; his growing awareness and frustration while living and working in Baltimore.