Robert S. Levine is a distinguished university professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His recent books include The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Harvard University Press, 2016), Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson (W. W. Norton, August 2021). He is the general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature.