This original collection gathers a remarkably diverse body of literature about John Brown, the strident anti-slavery leader. Besides a selection of letters by the abolitionist himself, the book includes a significant excerpt from W. E. B. Du Bois's biography, John Brown , addresses by Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, poetry by Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville, and much more.