Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

About the Book

They were the pre-eminent self-made men of their time. Abraham Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less than one year of formal schooling and became the nation's greatest President. Frederick Douglass spent the first twenty years of his life as a slave, had no formal schooling - his masters forbade him to read or write - and became one of the nation's greatest writers and activists. At a time when most whites would not let a black man cross their threshold, Lincoln met Douglass three times at the White House. Their friendship was based on usefulness: Lincoln recognised that he needed Douglass to help him destroy the Confederacy and preserve the Union; Douglass realised that Lincoln's shrewd sense of public opinion would serve his own goal of freeing the nation's blacks.

About the Author :
John Stauffer is Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. His first book, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Harvard University Press, 2002), was the co-winner of the 2002 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institue; winner of the Avery Craven Book Prize from the OAH; and the Lincoln Prize runner-up.

Review :
A lyrical, insightful treatment of the fascinating relationship between two geniuses, one a politician and the other a radical reformer. Both Lincoln and Douglass heard the music of words in their heads as few others, and Stauffer has an ear for the two of them in harmony. That they started in such different places ideologically and yet moved together at the critical moment of emancipation makes this a timely and important book. Stauffer brings the tools of literature and history to bear on this comparison with unmatched skill. - David W. Blight, Yale University, author of Frederick Douglass' Civil War

Illuminating...[Stauffer] effectively captures the predicaments of the two men...[their story] gains fresh color in this swift moving, stylish account. - Publishers Weekly

Stands apart from other biographies by focusing on how each man continually remade himself, with help from women, words, self-education, physical strength, and luck. In the process Stauffer gives us the texture and feel-a thick description -of the strange worlds that Douglass and Lincoln inhabited. The result is a path-breaking work that dissolves traditional conceptions of these two seminal figures (Lincoln the redeemer president, Douglass the assimilationist). He reveals how Douglass towered over Lincoln as a brilliant orator, writer, agitator, and public figure for most of his life. He shows us how