SOURCE: "The Problem of Being: Some Reflections on Black Autobiography," in Obsidian, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1975, pp. 18-30.

In the following essay, Baker focuses on The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass as one of the best examples illustrating the African American autobiographer's "quest for being," or self-definition.

It was a severe cross, and I took it up reluctantly. The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease.

Frederick Douglass

Benedetto Croce called autobiography "a by-product of an egotism and a self-consciousness which achieve nothing but to render obvious their own futility and should be left to die of it." And one of the most important critics of the Black American Renaissance of the twenties expressed some of...