Authors, Poets & Novelists Posters & Prints: “Dou...-Doy...-”
for the literature, language arts and social studies classrooms, home schoolers, and scholars.

Frederick Douglass Writer's Who Changed the World Poster Series

Frederick Douglass
b. 2-14-c.1818; Maryland
d. 2-20-1895

Poster Text: “The more I read, the more I was lead to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men.”- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in rural Maryland – he never knew exactly when he was born. As a child, he wore nothing but a shirt, ate little but mush, and lived in fear of the brutal beatings that were common on the plantation. When he was 7 or 8 years old, he was sent to Baltimore to serve as a houseboy for the Auld family. Mrs. Sophia Auld taught “Freddy” the alphabet and some simple words before her husband ordered her to stop. But Freddy did not stop, and he learned how to read by tricking some white servants into helping him. By the time he was went back to work in the fields, he had made up his mind to be free. He held on to this feeling through several years of horrible treatment as a field slave. He finally escaped in 1838 and made his way north to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he took the name “Frederick Douglass.”

An anti-slavery group invited Douglass to talk to them. He soon became known as a powerful speaker and a leader of the abolitionist movement. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, was published in 1845. The book was very popular because Douglass wrote about the evils of slavery in his own truthful words.

After Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was published, Douglass was the best-known and most respected African American leader in the nation. He founded a magazine, published two more works of autobiography, and helped recruit African American troops during the Civil War. After the Civil War, Douglass served as Minister to Haiti and as the Marshal for the District of Columbia. He died in 1895.

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Rita Dove
b. 8-28-1952; Akron, OH

Rita Dove was 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry and Poet Laureate of the United States.

Dove's poetry is lyrical, musical - listen to her read her American Smooth at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. American Smooth is a type of ballroom dance, - listen to the flow and rhythm.

Rita Dove quotes ~
• “If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.”
• “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
• “If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.”

• Rita Dove at Amazon

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
b. 5-22-1858; Edinburgh, Scotland
d. 7-2-1930; Crowborough, East Sussex, England

Arthur Conan Doyle was a medical doctor who is famous for his characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Arthur Conan Doyle quote ~
• “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” ~ Sherlock Holmes

• Sherlock Holmes book cover posters
• Hound of the Baskerville posters
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes