Publisher’s original dust jacket artwork for Benjamin Quarles’s Frederick Douglass (1948), the first full-length biography of the great reformer, orator, and statesman.

One of the first full-length biographical portraits of the life of Frederick Douglass

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This is the original dust jacket artwork for the first definitive study of Frederick Douglass’s life, published by the Associated Publishers, the most important Black American publishing house of the twentieth century.

Penned by Benjamin Quarles, a renowned African-American scholar, Frederick Douglass was “reprinted several times over the next five decades. According to the recollections of colleagues and family members, no white publishers had been interested in the manuscript, but the book was well received among black academics and intellectuals.” (Rosalyn Terborg-Penn)

Quarles’s book was published two years after the end of World War II. It emerged during a time of elevated expectations for social and political change among African Americans, who anticipated improved civil rights and opportunities due to their wartime sacrifices.

The artwork for the book’s dust jacket was created by James Lesesne Wells, a printmaker, graphic artist, and 1925 Columbia University graduate who later worked in Harlem and Washington, D.C.

Along with Lois Mailou Jones, Wells served as the house illustrator for Carter G. Woodson’s Associated Publishers. See, as an example, Wells’ artwork for Willis Richardson’s Plays and Pageants of Negro Life (1930), a defining example of Harlem Renaissance period book illustration.

Price: $12,500.00