Purporting to be a biography of [Frederick] Douglass, Free at Last reads more like a novel. Emphasized throughout are the protagonist's secret musings, the author's narrative omniscience and the mood of each scene. Nowhere is there probing analysis, historical perspective or sophisticated scholarship. We read much—real or imagined—in Free at Last of Frederick Douglass the man of anger, passion and resentment; but we see little of Frederick Douglass the thinker, the writer, the political strategist. Douglass was all of these things, and because Bontemps portrays only Douglass' more "salable" characteristics, his book must be judged at best incomplete, and at worst deceitful. (pp. 295-96)

Brian Neal Odell, "Book Reviews: 'Free at Last: The Life of Frederick Douglass'," in America (© America Press, 1971; all rights reserved), Vol. 125, No. 11, October 16, 1971, pp. 295-96.