“Luckily for the World, Dumas was born in France and not in America, where he would have been circumscribed and might have used his genius in the struggle for elementary liberty like his notable Negro contemporary, Frederick Douglass.” This observation by J.A. Rogers, the unassailable icon of Afro-Atlantic history, outlines the fundamental struggle of Douglass' literary career. His development as artist and intellectual was circumscribed by the time and place in which he was born. Almost everything he wrote was informed by the struggle against slavery, racial discrimination, and the indelible imprint they left on his life.

Douglass' major work was an autobiography, which was dominated by the themes of his personal struggle against slavery, humiliation, stereotyping, and sexual repression. He was apologetic about the autobiographical nature of his writing. “I write freely of myself, not from choice, but because I have, by my cause, been morally forced into thus writing,” said Douglass in the fourth and final version of his autobiography. Writing freely, and yet lacking choice; writing freely and yet feeling forced. These contradictions did not result from a careless formulation of ideas, but from the dilemma of Douglass' life and literary career.

Douglass' early development as a writer had been assisted but also hemmed in by white friends who had strong ideas about what roles black Americans ought to play in American literary and intellectual life as well as in their own emancipation.