In an 1876 speech delivered at the unveiling of Thomas Ball's The Freedmen's Monument, a sculpture depicting a magnanimous Abraham Lincoln granting mercy to a shackled Missouri slave, Frederick Douglass balances praise and criticism of a President whom he would later glorify in both editions of his final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892). In his speech, Douglass states that his complicated description of Lincoln gets to the real historical individual, “not by isolated facts torn from their connection; not by any partial and imperfect glimpses, caught in inopportune moments; but by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events” (229–30). Douglass's statement on locating the historical Lincoln offers an apt analogue to Robert Levine's approach to elucidating the complex Douglass in his dazzling literary biography, The Lives of Frederick Douglass, which carefully tracks the evolution – and contradictions – of one of the early American republic's central figures.

Levine's biography corrects several decades of scholarship – and social movements – that have elevated specific aspects and moments in Douglass's life to suit particular readings or political motives – from Benjamin Quarles's decision to prioritize Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) for the John Harvard Library Series (1960) and the editors’ disavowal of the two Dublin editions of the Narrative for Yale University Press's Frederick Douglass Papers (1999), to American civil rights activists’ representations of Douglass as an advocate for either peaceful or violent protest and James Oakes's romanticization of Douglass and Lincoln's friendship. As a remedy to this issue, Levine presents what he calls the “lives” of Douglass as a “collage,” an approach that presents “a revisionist biography of the man as a social reformer, African American leader, and writer” (29). Levine achieves his goal by reading Douglass's three major autobiographies and novella with and against his many speeches, newspaper articles, essays, personal writings, and even each other.

As Levine illustrates, Douglass's Narrative remains his most popular text despite the fact that its iconicity would have “shocked” Douglass (2), in part because it “has nothing to say about his life as a free person (fifty years of his adult career)” (25). Critics such as fellow Douglass biographers William McFeely and especially James Sekora offer what have become popular readings of the Narrative that question its integrity because of Garrison's purported belief that blacks ought to remain subordinates. As Levine points out, however, such readings succeed by overstating Garrison's power over Douglass and his text. Rather than suffocate the message, Douglass's Narrative shows the ways in which Garrison and other abolitionists worked collaboratively with the young (semiliterate) author to create what Levine provocatively designates “the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society Narrative” (68).

Douglass's attitudes toward moral suasionism and its great champion Garrison changed quickly, and Levine traces those changes as they first appeared in the two neglected Dublin editions of the Narrative (1845, 1846), continued through his novella on slave rebel Madison Washington, The Heroic Slave (1853), and culminated with his second – and far more revolutionary – autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). Central to Douglass's desire to wrest authorship of his autobiography from Garrison was the “Cambria incident,” which appears in My Bondage. While aboard the Cambria, Douglass defied a pro-slavery mob that sought to silence him for sharing his horrific experiences as a slave. Levine observes that, though still on good terms with Garrison, the “Cambria incident” made Douglass “more autonomous and self-reliant” (78), and helped drive him to publish the two Dublin editions of the Narrative, whose paratexts dramatically alter how contemporary readers encountered Douglass's self-representation.

In many ways, the “Cambria incident” also aligned Douglass with Madison Washington, whom Douglass likely first read about in the pages of The Liberator. Washington's successful rebellion helped Douglass realize the value of violent resistance to slavery and, with the help of Gerrit Smith, Garrison's major rival, Douglass broke from Garrison and became a member of Smith's “politically radical and militant Liberty Party” (126). Loosely based on the Washington-led rebellion aboard the Creole in 1841, Douglass's The Heroic Slave combines fiction, autobiography, and history to justify the violent overthrow of slavery as an institution.

Douglass's interest in self-representation would inform two critical relationships he had later in life: his “friendship” with Lincoln and his ostensible reconciliation with his former owner, Thomas Auld. In the book's most powerful section, Levine dismantles the Douglass and Lincoln friendship as mythologized by writers such as Oakes. As Levine shows, though, Douglass criticized Lincoln throughout the 1860s, and even refused to support his second run for presidency until Douglass had little choice. He similarly shaped his meeting with the dying Auld, who by Douglass's description in Life and Times seeks the forgiveness of his ex-slave and is the lesser man.

Although the chapter on Lincoln is powerful, it is also somewhat tendentiously argued. Levine consistently contends that Douglass wrote positively of Lincoln in Life and Times because, “By portraying Lincoln in all his glory, Douglass becomes part of that glory” (203). As Levine himself shows, however, Douglass did not need to attach himself to Lincoln for popularity's or posterity's sake. He was perhaps the most celebrated African American of his time.

At the book's end, Levine states that “no single or transparent Douglass emerges” from the final edition of Life and Times (304). The same can be said about Levine's outstanding literary biography of Douglass; as Levine demonstrates, “no single or transparent” Douglass can emerge from a biography because Douglass's many stories about himself often differ or even contradict each other. Instead, Levine's biography carefully assembles the many pieces of Douglass's life to construct a multilayered image – that is, a collage – of someone who was never static but changed over time. Simply put, Levine reconstructs the many lives of Frederick Douglass and, in doing so, gives us an excellent sense of who Douglass really was.