Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
Published 1845 · 36,189 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · History, Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction
How hard is Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to read?
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass scores 24 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Elevated 19th-century prose with biblical cadences and some archaic constructions.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Concrete testimony with rhetorical argument. Abstraction serves political purpose.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with personal testimony, social observation, and political argument in compact form.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Direct autobiography. Douglass tells his story as testimony.
- Symbolic density: 35 out of 100
- Literacy, the fight with Covey, and the journey north all carry powerful symbolic meaning.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- Douglass employs rhetorical irony about Christian slaveholders and American freedom. The tone is passionate, not detached.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- Escape details are withheld to protect others, but the outcome is clear from the introduction.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- Chronological autobiography. Simple, powerful structure.
How Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is regarded
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.