To consider Frederick Douglass as an autobiographer, it is useful to examine each of his three autobiographical texts with a view to drawing some conclusion about their relation to one another, and about the relation of the author to each one. It seems likely that the shifting of Douglass' narrative stance is an index of his intellectual development and of his understanding of himself in relation to the larger society. The first autobiography, "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Written by Himself," commonly acknowledged as the best of the slave narrative genre, transcends the conventional form of the slave narrative and is the product of an exceptional mind whose very literacy is an act of rebellion. "My Bondage and My Freedom," the second autobiography, analyzing and reviewing the experience of the "Narrative," represents the assumption by Douglass of a rebellious literate posture which enables him to reject the strictures (urged upon him by white abolitionists) of the earlier formal genre. The third autobiography, "The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass," considered by many to be a literary failure, is a manipulation of already existing texts. It reveals Douglass grappling in old age with the problem of documenting his place and presence in a changed world, where the cause which had initially impelled him to literacy and to freedom had disappeared. (Sixteen references are attached.) (SR)