Reading List

Authors Like Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Talbot County, Maryland, around 1818; he never knew his birthday and chose 14 February. As a boy in Baltimore he was taught the alphabet by Sophia Auld until her husband stopped the lessons, and he kept learning in secret. On 3 September 1838 he escaped north by train. His Narrative (1845) made him so well known that he sailed for Britain and Ireland the same year, and in 1846 supporters there raised the money to buy his freedom. He founded The North Star in Rochester in 1847, gave ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ in the same city on 5 July 1852, and wrote his life three times before he died in 1895. The ten writers below share his conviction that telling your own story, in print and under your own name, is a political act.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Slave narrative · Abolitionist writing · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

The closest matches to Frederick Douglass are Harriet Jacobs, whose Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) tells the story from a woman's side, Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped into slavery who wrote Twelve Years a Slave (1853), and Ida B. Wells, whose 1892 pamphlet on lynching opens with a letter from Douglass himself. Further down are the narrative that came before his, and the writers who argued about what freedom should mean after him.

10 authors like Frederick Douglass

01
The narrative that came first

Olaudah Equiano

British, by his own account born in present-day Nigeria · The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789)

Equiano was enslaved as a child, bought his freedom in 1766 and settled in Britain, where he campaigned against the slave trade. His Interesting Narrative, published in London in 1789, was a bestseller. The historian Vincent Carretta has found records suggesting he was born in South Carolina, not Africa; the question is still debated. He died in 1797.

Equiano's book set the pattern Douglass's followed: a life told in the first person, sold to support a campaign, and written to prove the author could write it himself. It suits readers who want the transatlantic beginning of the story.

— Lisanne
02
The first woman's account in Britain

Mary Prince

Bermudian · The History of Mary Prince (1831)

Prince was born into slavery in Bermuda around 1788 and was enslaved in Bermuda, the Turks Islands and Antigua. Her owners brought her to London in 1828, where she left them. She dictated her story to Susanna Strickland, and the Anti-Slavery Society's secretary, Thomas Pringle, published it in 1831: the first account of the life of a Black woman published in Britain.

Prince's short book describes beatings, sales and family separation with the same plainness Douglass used, fourteen years before his Narrative. It suits readers who want the British and Caribbean side of the abolition story.

— Lisanne
03
The story from a woman's side

Harriet Jacobs

American · Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813. To escape her owner's sexual harassment she hid for nearly seven years in a crawl space above her grandmother's storeroom, before escaping north in 1842. She published her book under the pseudonym Linda Brent; its authorship was confirmed by the historian Jean Fagan Yellin in the 1980s. She died in 1897.

Jacobs writes openly about the sexual abuse of enslaved women, which Douglass's Narrative describes only from the outside. Read the two together for the full picture.

— Lisanne
04
The free man who was kidnapped

Solomon Northup

American · Twelve Years a Slave (1853)

Northup was born free in New York State and worked as a farmer and violinist. In 1841 he was lured to Washington, D.C., drugged and sold, and he spent twelve years enslaved in Louisiana before he was freed in January 1853. His book, written with David Wilson, came out that year; Steve McQueen's 2013 film of it won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Northup and Douglass both write as witnesses whose own lives are the evidence. Northup's book suits readers who want to see the Louisiana plantations that enslaved people in Maryland feared being sold to.

— Lisanne
05
The journalist he wrote to

Ida B. Wells

American · Southern Horrors (1892), The Red Record (1895)

Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862 and became a co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech. After three of her friends were lynched in Memphis in 1892 she began investigating lynching across the South. A letter from Douglass, dated 25 October 1892, was printed at the front of Southern Horrors, and in 1893 the two worked together on a pamphlet protesting the exclusion of Black Americans from the Chicago World's Fair. She died in 1931.

Wells carried Douglass's method into investigative journalism: name the crime, collect the facts, publish them yourself. She suits readers who want the generation that picked up his work.

— Lisanne
06
The other famous autobiography

Booker T. Washington

American · Up from Slavery (1901)

Washington was born into slavery in Virginia in 1856 and founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881. In a speech at the Atlanta Exposition in September 1895, seven months after Douglass's death, he urged Black Americans to put vocational education and economic progress before an immediate fight for political and social equality; critics called it the Atlanta Compromise. He died in 1915.

Washington's book is the other great American life story that starts in slavery, but it argues for patience where Douglass argued for full rights at once. It suits readers who want to see the argument that followed Douglass's death.

— Lisanne
07
The answer to Washington

W. E. B. Du Bois

American · The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868 and in 1895 became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. The Souls of Black Folk introduced the idea of ‘double consciousness’ and includes a chapter, ‘Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others’, that attacks the Atlanta Compromise. He co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and died in Ghana in 1963.

Du Bois took up Douglass's demand for full equality and made it the centre of a new argument. The Souls of Black Folk suits readers who want the essays rather than the life story.

— Lisanne
08
The letter to the next generation

James Baldwin

American · Notes of a Native Son (1955), The Fire Next Time (1963)

Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924 and moved to Paris in 1948. The Fire Next Time opens with a letter to his nephew written for the hundredth anniversary of emancipation. He died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, in 1987.

Baldwin is Douglass's twentieth-century heir as an essayist and public speaker: both address white America directly and refuse to soften the charge. He suits readers who loved the Fourth of July speech.

— Lisanne

Every book by James Baldwin →

09
What the narratives left out

Toni Morrison

American · Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987)

Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. Beloved is based on the case of Margaret Garner, who escaped from slavery in Kentucky in 1856 and killed her daughter rather than see her returned; it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and died in 2019.

In her 1987 essay ‘The Site of Memory’, Morrison wrote that the authors of slave narratives, writing for white readers, drew a veil over what was too terrible to tell. Her novels imagine what lay behind it, which makes Beloved the fiction to read after Douglass.

— Lisanne

Every book by Toni Morrison →

10
Baltimore, again

Ta-Nehisi Coates

American · Between the World and Me (2015), The Water Dancer (2019), The Message (2024)

Coates was born in Baltimore in 1975. Between the World and Me, a letter to his teenage son about race and the body, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015. The Water Dancer is a novel of the Underground Railroad with Harriet Tubman as a character. The Message (2024), which includes an essay criticising Israel's treatment of Palestinians, drew both praise and fierce criticism.

Coates writes about the same city Douglass escaped from, in the same direct, argumentative first person. He suits readers who want to see how the questions Douglass asked sound now.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ta-Nehisi Coates →

Where to start if you loved Frederick Douglass

If you want the woman's story, read Harriet Jacobs.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: nearly seven years in hiding, told by the woman who endured them.

If you want where the form began, read Olaudah Equiano.

The Interesting Narrative: the 1789 bestseller that set the pattern.

If you want the argument after him, read W. E. B. Du Bois.

The Souls of Black Folk: essays on what freedom had and had not delivered by 1903.

If you want it as a novel, read Toni Morrison.

Beloved: the story behind the veil the narratives drew.

If you have only read the Narrative, read Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).

His second, longer autobiography, written ten years later and more openly angry.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Frederick Douglass

Who writes like Frederick Douglass?

Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup and Olaudah Equiano wrote the other essential narratives of slavery. Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois and James Baldwin carried on his work as writers who argued in public.

What should I read after Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass?

Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave (1853). Douglass's own My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) is the best next book by him.

How many autobiographies did Frederick Douglass write?

Three: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892).

Is Frederick Douglass like Booker T. Washington?

Both were born into slavery and wrote famous autobiographies. Douglass demanded full civil and political rights; Washington's 1895 Atlanta speech asked Black Americans to put economic progress first, which Du Bois attacked in The Souls of Black Folk.

Which Frederick Douglass book should I read first?

The Narrative (1845) is short and the usual start. Then read his speech ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’, given in Rochester on 5 July 1852.

Did Frederick Douglass know Ida B. Wells?

Yes. His letter of support, dated 25 October 1892, was printed at the front of her pamphlet Southern Horrors, and in 1893 they worked together on a pamphlet protesting the exclusion of Black Americans from the Chicago World's Fair.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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From the bookshelf

“From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.”

— Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

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Every book by Frederick Douglass, in order →

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