Giants（ISBN=） 英文原版

  　Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln were the
preeminent self-made men of their time. In this masterful dual
biography, award-winning Harvard University scholar John Stauffer
describes the transformations in the lives of these two giants
during a major shift in cultural history, when men rejected the
status quo and embraced new ideals of personal liberty. As Douglass
and Lincoln reinvented themselves and ultimately became friends,
they transformed America.
　　Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less than one year of formal
schooling, and became the nation’s greatest president. Douglass
spent the first twenty years of his life as a slave, had no formal
schooling-in fact, his masters forbade him to read or write-and
became one of the nation’s greatest writers and activists, as well
as a spellbinding orator and messenger of audacious hope, the
pioneer who blazed the path traveled by future African-American
leaders.
　　At a time when most whites would not let a black man cross their
threshold, Lincoln invited Douglass into the White House. Lincoln
recognized that he needed Douglass to help him destroy the
Confederacy and preserve the Union; Douglass realized that
Lincoln’s shrewd sense of public opinion would serve his own goal
of freeing the nation’s blacks. Their relationship shifted in
response to the country’s debate over slavery, abolition, and
emancipation.
　　Both were ambitious men. They had great faith in the moral and
technological progress of their nation. And they were not always
consistent in their views. John Stauffer describes their personal
and political struggles with a keen understanding of the dilemmas
Douglass and Lincoln confronted and the social context in which
they occurred. What emerges is a brilliant portrait of how two of
America’s greatest leaders lived.

　　John Stauffer is Professor of English and American Literature
and Language at Harvard University. His first book, The Black
Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race
(Harvard University Press, 2002), was the co-winner of the 2002
Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institue;
winner of the Avery Craven Book Prize from the OAH; and the Lincoln
Prize runner-up. Other works include: Meteor of War: The John Brown
Story (with Zoe Trodd, 2004); Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My
Freedom.