The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is one of the best known of more than 6,000 slave narratives written from the colonial period through the early twentieth century. In it, Douglass chronicles the humiliations and abuses he suffered as a young teenage slave and his subsequent escape. The uniqueness of the text is to be found in its elegant, unadorned prose and keen insights into the psyche of the slave owners and the machinations with which the system was perpetuated, day by day, through the greed and self-serving operations of the slave holder.