24

xxxvi INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME THREE

American readers turned away from autobiography and embraced fiction.
Readers of this period sought entertainment in the sentimental novels and
stories of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page; in the squalid Civil
War prison narratives of John Ransom and T. H. Mann; and even in the grisly
realism of Union veteran Ambrose Bierce's relentlessly graphic battlefield
tales. The public's desire for sentiment and horror was gratified by stories
and serialized novels published in the successful monthly magazines,
Scribner's, Lippincott's, Century, and Harper's Weekly.⁵⁰ Considering the
literary climate in which Life and Times was published, Douglass's third
autobiography may reasonably be viewed as relatively successful compared
to the contemporaneous writings of other well-known former abolitionists,
both black and white.

A disappointment to its author during his lifetime, Life and Times gar-
nered an even worse reception in the twentieth century. A number of modern
historians and literary scholars dismissed the third autobiography, compar-
ing it unfavorably with Douglass's antebellum narratives. According to Eric
Sundquist,

The preference that a number of recent literary critics have shown for
the 1845 Narrative, over My Bondage and My Freedom and especially
the more self-indulgent Life and Times, indicates not just a distrust of
the patriotic rhetoric, the gothic and sentimental Iiterary conventions.
and the myth of self-made success that are more characteristic of the
later volumes. It also suggests a problematic historiographical choice to
be made between the Douglass closest to, and thus presumably best able
to articulate, the experience of slavery and the Douglass who purposely
constructed for himself a linguistically more sophisticated "American"
identity, with figures such as the framers of the Constitution or Benjamin
Franklin as his models.⁵¹

Some scholars view Life and Times as the embodiment of a disturbing
shift in the character of postbellum black autobiographies and or African
American literature as a whole. Some have argued that after emancipation,
black autobiographers relinquished their oppositional voice and their focus
on asserting black identity against a slaveholding nation, only to replace
opposition with accommodation of the values and goals of the white middle
class into which they attempted to assimilate. For these critics, the exem-

^{5050. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.,
2001), 216.}

^{5151. Sundquist, Frederick Douglass, 4.}