My Bondage My Freedom is Frederick Douglass's second autobiography written after 10 years of reflection following his legal emancipation in 1846 and his break with his mentor William Lloyd Garrison. My Bondadge My Freedom catapulted Douglass into the international spotlight as the foremost spokesman for American blacks, freed and slave.

Frederick Douglass was born in slavery as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey near Easton in Talbot County, Maryland. He was not sure of the exact year of his birth, but he knew that it was 1817 or 1818. As a young boy he was sent to Baltimore, to be a house servant, where he learned to read and write, with the assistance of his master's wife. In 1838 he escaped from slavery and went to New York City, where he married Anna Murray, a free colored woman whom he had met in Baltimore. Soon thereafter he changed his name to Frederick Douglass.

In 1841 he addressed a convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Nantucket and so greatly impressed the group that they immediately employed him as an agent. He was such an impressive orator that numerous persons doubted if he had ever been a slave, so he Wrote Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass. His autobiographical works include Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.