Blight spent a decade writing the definitive biography of Douglass, working through private collections and forgotten archives to produce a portrait of the most important Black American of the nineteenth century. It won the Pulitzer. What separates it from earlier biographies is Blight's refusal to simplify Douglass into a symbol; the man who emerges is brilliant, vain, relentless, and sometimes wrong.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.