So he mastered these many different forms of writing, which not everybody can do, even if they're

an accomplished writer. And he did some of that greatest writing in crisis moments of

his life I mean really difficult personal times in his life which is not uncommon for a lot of great artists,

but it's certainly true here,

like the early 1850s.

His whole life is coming apart in the 1850s.

You can't even feed his family family his newspaper almost dies every week or every month

he goes through this terrible public breakup with Garrison this personal scandal but he

produces his greatest speech as one novella and his

greatest long-form masterpiece in bondage and freedom and some of the best

editorials ever written in the history of abolitionism all in a three or four year

period. While he was having I'm at the end of the tunnel. Today I'm

experimenting. I am going to do something I haven't done before on this podcast. It's something that I've been wanting to do since I started at the end of the tunnel and I've been fortunate to have some really amazing guests come on and share their backstory of starting their movement, but I was thinking, why limit the guests to people who are currently on the planet?

And no, I'm not talking about aliens or anything like that. I'm referring to people who are no longer alive.

But when they were alive, they created incredible movements.

And one historical figure that I've been obsessed with ever since I read the first of his three autobiographies is Frederick Douglas, who was of course born a slave, then he became one of the most prominent abolitionists of his time and at one point he was even heralded as the most famous black man in the world and the most photographed person in all of America. And this happened in the 1800s so you can

imagine there were no dull moments in his life and to share Douglas'

fascinating life story I'm honored to have on the podcast today the world's foremost expert on the life of Frederick

Douglas. He's the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Douglas biography called Frederick Douglas Prophet of Freedom, which was an incredible

read that combines stories and insights from Douglas' three autobiographies, plus it draws from

a recently discovered repository of Frederick

Douglas's letters and papers from the latter third of his life which had not previously

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