2019 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History
by David W. Blight
In this remarkable biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. Douglass was not only an astonishing man of words, but a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology. There has not been a major biography of Douglass in a quarter century. David Blight’s Frederick Douglass affords this important American the distinguished biography he deserves.
The Pulitzer Prize has been awarded by Columbia University each spring since 1917. The awards are chosen by a board of jurors for Journalism, Letters, Music and Drama. The awards for Letters include Nonfiction, Poetry, Biography or Autobiography, History, and Fiction.