AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The Civil War (1861–1865) marked the beginning of a transformation in American literary culture that culminated with the emergence of modernism around the time of World War I (1914–1918). In the largest sense, the Civil War—followed by a period of industrialization, technological innovation, urbanization, immigration, and imperial expansion—accelerated the decline of literary and artistic romanticism and the rise of realism. The new outlook was based on materialism, science (biology, economics, and geography), and determinism rather than on idealism, intuition, and individualism. These changes altered autobiography, and the notion of who was entitled to write one, and ultimately placed the possibility of textual self-understanding under suspicion, from which it has yet to emerge.

Nevertheless, the tradition of the self-made man, established by Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), dominated the self-conceptions of many Americans of every race and ethnicity well into the twentieth century. African American writers, who produced slave narratives before the Civil War, now endeavored to make the most of their altered circumstances while struggling with the ongoing impediments to freedom during Reconstruction and the era of Jim Crow. During the Progressive Era near the turn of the twentieth century, the "New Woman" began to demand equality, opportunity, and political power. So did many immigrant writers, who by the end of the nineteenth century were arriving in unprecedented numbers, building businesses, and taking control of the cities. The struggles between capital and labor, coupled with new political movements such as anarchism, raised the specter of a new Civil War. Meanwhile, the final opening of the western states for settlement reinvigorated some elements in the American character (piety, acquisitiveness, and violence) while simultaneously calling these values into question, particularly as they were implicated in racism, imperialism, and environmental devastation. Amidst all this change, some of the heirs of the original European settler cultures wondered what had happened to their country. They sentimentalized the past and were uncertain about a future about to pass out of their exclusive control. All these struggles were reflected in American autobiography, which represented the reciprocal relationship between self and national identity in a period of rapid change.

SELF-MADE MEN

The exemplary American personality—practical, hardworking, and ambitious—presented in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1789) influenced the way Americans of all backgrounds presented themselves in their autobiographical writings, notwithstanding the burgeoning criticism of the Franklinian vision of the United States as an economic meritocracy. Franklin's memoir was surely the most widely disseminated American autobiography of the nineteenth century, and practically all would-be autobiographers, including women, African Americans, and recent immigrants, had to reckon with Franklin's model of the bourgeois American self (or a mediated version of it): someone born into poverty and obscurity who manages through hard work and moral virtue to rise to a position of wealth and fame. The spiritual journey also structured the success narrative, which often substituted economic success for the arrival in what John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress called the "Celestial City." In this case, wealth is a manifestation of moral virtue and is bestowed on people so that they might become benefactors to their society, a task that may well include the imperative to present themselves as moral exemplars. The self-made man tradition negotiates the tension between the material and the spiritual, the individual and the community, by asserting that self-interest coincides with the interests of society. The popularity of Horatio Alger Jr.'s Ragged Dick series (beginning in 1867), which invariably describes the ascent of poor but virtuous and hard-working boys, suggests how the self-made man tradition was useful both as a stimulus to capitalist economic development and as a means to invalidate the discontent of large numbers of oppressed and disadvantaged people by telling them: "You too could be rich, if only you had tried harder."

The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself—possibly the second-best-selling autobiography of the nineteenth century—reflects the influence of Franklin as well as an awareness of the limitations of his model of the American self. Barnum (1810–1981) originally had it published in 1855, but it was revised, expanded, condensed, and republished several times in many different editions until the end of the nineteenth century (most often with the title Struggles and Triumphs, first used in 1869). Like Franklin's Autobiography, Barnum's Life is the story of how a poor boy became a rich and famous man. From the beginning, however, Barnum emphasizes that he was born at a time that was substantially different from the eighteenth century. Image was already important for Franklin: by Barnum's time, however, image was everything in business, and Barnum became the founding father of American advertising. Nevertheless, to most of his readers, Struggles and Triumphs did not represent a rejection of Franklinian values; rather, the showman was a product of the go-getting marketplace these values encouraged. The tenet was: do what is necessary to succeed first then tend to the finer points of moral virtue and civic responsibility. Barnum's evolving autobiographies follow this pattern: as he becomes more prosperous, he cultivates the image of a benefactor of society, a purveyor of respectable, educational, and morally uplifting amusements rather than a hoaxer and humbug. But even as he becomes an eminent Victorian, Barnum, like Franklin, continues to take pride in his humble origins and to wink at his readers, suggesting that even his public service is a form of personal opportunism, a means of access to the social and political power held by established elites.

CIVIL WAR MEMOIRS

A substantial proportion of Americans were directly involved in the Civil War and practically everyone was affected by it in some way. Two million men had served in the Union Army, and about 750,000 had fought for the Confederacy. Some 3.5 million slaves were liberated. Probably more than a million Americans were either killed or wounded in the war. It was undoubtedly the most traumatic event in American history, and it is not surprising that autobiographical writings of those who lived through that era would treat it as one of the formative experiences of their subjects' lives.

Louis Kaplan's Bibliography of American Autobiographies lists more than five hundred Civil War memoirs published before 1945. About seventy came out before 1870; fewer than twenty were published in the 1870s (though Memoirs of Gen. William T. Sherman appeared in 1875); but the rate of publication peaked in the next decade at nearly sixty, and such memoirs continued to be published in comparable numbers until about 1920, when Civil War veterans began to die out and the experiences of World War I assumed much greater prominence. The men who fought in the war, such as Warren Lee Goss, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Lewis Wallace, had a sense that they had made history, that they had important stories to tell, if not as individuals, then as representatives of the experiences of many Americans.

The most famous and influential of these autobiographical writings is Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs. Grant (1822–1885) wrote it under dramatic circumstances, while dying of throat cancer, and it sold more than 300,000 copies by subscription, becoming the best-selling title in the crowded genre of Civil War memoirs. It was, however, unlike many other works published in that era in that it was not an apologia for military blunders, a self-serving account of personal or regimental heroism, or a prelude to the pursuit of political office. Grant's spare prose, unlike the romantic style of some of his contemporaries, reflected and reinforced the image he had during the Civil War of a plainspoken, practical, resolute man. His memoirs are starkly descriptive, without vanity or remorse. He sometimes portrays his younger self as an object of mockery: for example, his distaste for fancy uniforms was shaped by his judgment about the absurdity of his early admiration for them. And he corrects romanticized retellings of his activities, such as events surrounding the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. The commanding general of the Union, like his Confederate counterpart, tended to see himself as a tool in the hands of forces larger than himself. But, like Franklin, Grant portrays himself as a man trying to discover his talents and to find an elevated place in the world.

In addition to its historical importance as a documentary record of the activities of a major figure in American history, Grant's memoirs are an important document marking the shift in American literature from romanticism to realism; it moves away from idealism toward a desire for hard facts expressed in almost scientific terms. It attests to the ascendancy of the practical man rather than the sentimentalist, the man of action over the man of eloquence. It looks back to the Plain Style of Puritan writing, and it looks ahead to the clipped sentences of Ernest Hemingway. Both Gertrude Stein and Edmund Wilson praised it as a seminal work in American literature.

Equally remarkable is the transition in the writings of the poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) from the flamboyant self-assertion of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) to his wistful prose recollections of the Civil War era in Specimen Days and Collect (1882), which constitutes what might be considered a poet's workshop of images and memories of Whitman's activities in Washington, D.C., from 1862 to 1865, when Whitman worked as a government clerk and volunteer hospital aide. If Specimen Days is an autobiography, it is a highly experimental one. The sketches describe the aftermath of battles, hospital scenes, camp life, conversations with soldiers, and glimpses of Lincoln. Whitman serves as a mediating consciousness and sometimes as an actor in the events he describes. In this sense, Specimen Days supports the mythic vision of Whitman portrayed in his collection of Civil War poems, Drum-Taps (1865). Specimen Days also marks a shift in literary technique from notions of a fully integrated self that can look back with clarity: the diary format preserves the integrity of impressions of the moment. Whitman's use of that form also avoids any organizing plot, such as the ascent from poverty to wealth. Events follow chronologically but their meaning is not defined, emerging only from the narrative as a whole, where the hospital serves as a metaphor for America, with the poet as healer preparing for a reconciliation between North and South. Ultimately, Specimen Days tends toward a pastoralism that seems out of step with the urbanization and industrialization of the postwar years.

WALT WHITMAN'S "HOSPITAL SCENES AND PERSONS"

Whitman's Specimen Days is an autobiography of the parallel development of the nation and the poet in the era of the Civil War. In particular, it reflects the shift in American literary culture away from romanticism toward realism. Whitman, like the photographer Mathew Brady, presents the painful aftermath of war in ugly detail rather than offering idealized portraits of military glory. Whitman and his America are redeemed by small acts of comradeship rather than by the capacity for violence.

Letter Writing.—When eligible, I encourage the men to write, and myself, when called upon, write all sorts of letters for them, (including love letters, very tender ones.) Almost as I reel off these memoranda, I write for a new patient to his wife. M. de F., of the 17th Connecticut, company H, has just come up (February 17th) from Windmill point, and is received in ward H, Armory-square. He is an intelligent looking man, has a foreign accent, black-eyed and hair'd, a Hebraic appearance. Wants a telegraphic message sent to his wife, New Canaan, Conn. I agree to send the message—but to make things sure I also sit down and write the wife a letter, and despatch it to the post-office immediately, as he fears she will come on, and he does not wish her to, as he will surely get well.

Saturday, January 30th.—Afternoon, visited Campbell hospital. Scene of cleaning up the ward, and giving the men all clean clothes—through the ward (6) the patients dressing or being dress'd—the naked upper half of the bodies—the good-humor and fun—the shirts, drawers, sheets of beds, &c., and the general fixing up for Sunday. Gave J. L. 50 cents.

Wednesday, February 4th.—Visited Armory-square hospital, went pretty thoroughly through wards E and D. Supplied paper and envelopes to all who wish'd—as usual, found plenty of men who needed those articles. Wrote letters. Saw and talk'd with two or three members of the Brooklyn 14th regt. A poor fellow in ward D, with a fearful wound in a fearful condition, was having some loose splinters of bone taken from the neighborhood of the wound. The operation was long, and one of great pain—yet, after it was well commenced, the soldier bore it in silence. He sat up, propp'd—was much wasted—had lain a long time quiet in one position (not for days only but weeks,) a bloodless, brown-skinn'd face, with eyes full of determination—belong'd to a New York regiment. There was an unusual cluster of surgeons, medical cadets, nurses, &c., around his bed—I thought the whole thing was done with tenderness, and done well. In one case, the wife sat by the side of her husband, his sickness typhoid fever, pretty bad. In another, by the side of her son, a mother—she told me she had seven children, and this was the youngest. (A fine, kind, healthy, gentle mother, good-looking, not very old, with a cap on her head, and dress'd like home—what a charm it gave to the whole ward.) I liked the woman nurse in ward E—I noticed how she sat a long time by a poor fellow who just had, that morning, in addition to his other sickness, bad hemorrhage—she gently assisted him, reliev'd him of the blood, holding a cloth to his mouth, as he coughed it up—he was so weak he could only just turn his head over on the pillow.

One young New York man, with a bright, handsome face, had been lying several months from a most disagreeable wound, receiv'd at Bull Run. A bullet had shot him right through the bladder, hitting him front, low in the belly, and coming out back. He had suffer'd much—the water came out of the wound, by slow but steady quantities, for many weeks—so that he lay almost constantly in a sort of puddle—and there were other disagreeable circumstances. He was of good heart, however. At present comparatively comfortable, had a bad throat, was delighted with a stick of horehound candy I gave him, with one or two other trifles.

Whitman, Specimen Days, in Prose Works, pp. 29–30.

Comparable to Specimen Days is the diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823–1886) compiled during the Civil War, revised twenty years later, and finally published in 1905 as A Diary from Dixie. Chesnut was the wife of a southern senator and plantation owner, and her diary provides insights into Confederate politics and domestic life. In some cases, these are seen through the lens of the Reconstruction-era politics.The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (1984) contains her defense of southern aristocratic womanhood set against the sexual immorality of slaveholders and female slaves, whom she regards unsympathetically as tempters who lure respectable men into adultery and miscegenation. Like Whitman, Chesnut does not provide an organizing narrative apart from the chronology of the war; the diary, however, does provide a consistent critique of the contradictions of southern culture, particularly with regard to slavery and gender roles.

AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

At least a hundred autobiographies by African Americans were published after the Civil War and before the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Slave narratives—the most common form in the antebellum period—often participated in the Franklinian tradition of an interconnected spiritual and secular ascent culminating in manumission. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) is the most famous and influential example of the genre. Powerful as the Narrative is, Douglass (1818–1895) depicts himself less as an individual than as an iconic slave appealing to the sentiments of white readers: "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?"

The period after the abolition of slavery required a reconfiguration of the social and political aims of African Americans as a group. If antebellum slave narrative dramatized the quest for individual and collective freedom, postbellum autobiographies focused on the acquisition of political power, the building of institutions, and the achievement of economic independence within the dominant culture. In this sense, African American autobiography also reflects the cultural shift from Romantic individualism mingled with evangelical Christianity to a more secular, materialist outlook based on the emerging realist sciences of sociology and economics. Antebellum slave narrators struggled for freedom; postbellum autobiographers struggled to achieve a dignified, bourgeois way of life in the midst of ongoing racial discrimination. The evolution from Douglass's Narrative to his My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882; rev. ed., 1892) reflects these larger patterns in African American autobiography. Douglass increasingly deals with his activities as a public figure—the "life and letters" mode—rather than dwelling on his experiences as a slave, from which he is increasingly detached (compare, for example, the succeeding versions of his battle with Covey, the slave breaker). As the century advanced, the image of Douglass as a slave—brutalized but intelligent, violent but pitiable—began to seem unsuitable as an exemplar on which to base the social advancement of African Americans.

Even as the Franklinian qualities of American autobiography were being questioned by writers such as Mark Twain (1835–1910), these same qualities were magnified in many African American autobiographies—particularly during the Jim Crow era—such as Henry Ossian Flipper's The Colored Cadet at West Point (1878), Out of the Ditch: A True Story of an Ex-Slave (1910) by Joseph Vance Lewis, William Holtzclaw's Black Man's Burden (1915), and From Slavery to Affluence: Memoirs of Robert Anderson, Ex-Slave (1927). These works avoid expressions of outrage against racial injustice and thus seem alien to moral sensibilities shaped by the civil rights movement of the late twentieth century. Flipper, for example, was subjected to dehumanizing cruelty and ostracism at West Point, but he does not criticize his classmates or the institutional support for racism; instead, he emphasizes his optimism about his future as a professional soldier (ironically, he would be unjustly court-martialed in 1881). Racism as a social pathology is not so much challenged by many African American autobiographers in this era as it is considered a surmountable hurdle on the road to success. These works encouraged African Americans to stifle their anger, demonstrate dignified moral superiority, and quietly build institutions.

The most influential African American autobiographer of this era was by far Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), the founder of Tuskegee Institute in 1881 and the author of Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1901). Written in a clear, plain style comparable to Grant's, Washington's autobiography presents him as a successful man who never takes a moment's rest and who shows the way to economic independence for other African Americans. The work is written less for literary readers than for the upwardly mobile young man, the African American heir to Franklin and Douglass. Washington emphasized cleanliness, good manners, and industrial education rather than political resistance and access to elite institutions. Washington's views of education and support for racial separatism made him vulnerable to the claim that he was casting African Americans as a permanently menial class, a charge that would be made forcefully by W. E. B. Du Bois (1863–1963) in his semiautobiographical The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903).

William Pickens's autobiography, The Heir of Slaves (1911), later revised under the title Bursting Bonds (1923), follows Du Bois rather than Washington, arguing that African Americans are being made to serve interests that are not their own. Like Washington, Pickens rose up from a slave family to become a professor at Talladega College in Alabama. But Pickens expresses his disillusionment with white control of ostensibly black institutions, and in fact left the academy to work for the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Pickens's book, along with Du Bois's, represents the transformation of African American autobiography from the Franklinian narratives of upward mobility (culminating in Washington's accomodationism) toward a more inward-looking and skeptical view of American culture—and a more militant opposition to white racism—during the Harlem Renaissance.

IMMIGRANT AUTOBIOGRAPHY

There are some affinities between African American autobiography and the life writings of the immigrants who came to the United States in unprecedented numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (at least 13 million between 1890 and 1910), often settling in major cities on the east coast. The autobiographies of immigrants during this era function partly as guides to survival and assimilation into a new culture, particularly a highly diverse, polyglot, urban culture. Just as Washington and Du Bois represented different outlooks on racism, recent immigrants presented a contrast between successful assimilation and group solidarity and political and economic exploitation.

The Danish immigrant Jacob Riis is best remembered for providing visceral, visual representation to accompany the many textual descriptions of the shame of the cities, where millions of recent immigrants lived in extreme poverty. His autobiography, The Making of an American (1901), describes the suffering he endured as a new arrival in America but also narrates the means by which Riis was able to elevate himself above drudgery, to marry well, and to become the personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt (who, incidentally, published his own autobiography in 1913). Over the course of his social ascent, Riis considers the complexity of his relationship to his former identity. He lost his Danish identity and became, for better or worse, "an American."

Mary Antin (1881–1949) describes a similar process of successful assimilation, though with less ambivalence, in The Promised Land (1912), originally serialized in the Atlantic Monthly in 1911. Antin depicts the sufferings of Jewish people in Polotsk, Russia: forced conscription, police persecution, and a prohibition on attending school. She embraces a new American identity given her by the public schools; she even changes her name from Maryashe. Antin develops an almost Emersonian view of universal human nature, though she can no longer think of herself as a Russian Jew, despite still feeling concern for the plight of her people.

There is often a note of loss in the accounts of assimilated immigrants. In The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Abraham Cahan presents a fictional version of the successful immigrant's life and establishes a link between the novel and autobiography by alluding to Franklin's arrival in Philadelphia. Levinsky enters the city with only a few pennies and rises to become a millionaire in the clothing industry; ultimately, he is unhappy because he is alienated from the self he left behind to become an American. Just as the bourgeois African American suffers from a form of "double consciousness" and risks alienation from what seem to be more authentic origins (as in Charles Chesnutt's 1899 short story, "The Wife of His Youth"), Cahan's Jewish immigrant cannot integrate the wealthy person he has become with the poor child he once was. Levinksy's success is complicated by a sense of tragic loss.

Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912) is in most respects a refutation of the Franklinian dream of success for immigrants. Berkman is also a Russian Jewish immigrant, but, instead of pursuing business, he becomes an anarchist and a friend of Emma Goldman. Berkman is radicalized by his experiences of poverty and his disillusionment with the dream of American equality and opportunity. In 1892 he attempts to assassinate the Gilded Age industrialist Henry Clay Frick, but he fails and is sentenced to twenty years in prison. There he develops a fierce solidarity with his fellow prisoners, and ultimately devotes his life to them, becoming a kind of anti-success story, which paradoxically leads to Berkman's redemption through nonviolence and service to the oppressed.

WOMEN AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The traditions of spiritual self-examination, diary keeping, and private, introspective verse were kept alive throughout the nineteenth century largely by women, for example, in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut. Although women were gaining ground at that time and into the Progressive Era, they still had fewer opportunities to enter the professions, assume positions of leadership, or otherwise gain the kind of public attention that most often led men to publish autobiographical works. There were notable exceptions, such as Laura Smith Haviland, a Quaker abolitionist whose A Woman's Life-Work (1881) was one of the most widely circulated American women's autobiographies before the twentieth century. Among several works by leaders of the early women's movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Eighty Years and More (1815–1897): Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1898) provides an authoritative personal history. There are also several memoirs of women's literary activities, such as Annie Fields's Authors and Friends (1896) and Julia Ward Howe's Reminiscences 1819–1899 (1899).

In general, women who published autobiographical writings in the late nineteenth century tended to avoid exposing their private lives to the public gaze. The so-called New Women began to find professional opportunities in teaching, missionary work, social services, nursing, and journalism, but those who wrote tended to emphasize their public actions more than their private thoughts, possibly because they embraced realist objectivity and were turning away from a sentimentalist emphasis on emotions associated with Victorian womanhood. Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) begins with childhood impressions but is primarily an account of hands-on social activism (the building of "Settlement Houses" for immigrants in Chicago). Addams (1860–1936), like other reformers, does not probe the complexities of her unique personal development so much as consider her participation in larger social forces.

Possibly the most widely read autobiography ever written by an American woman is Helen Keller's The Story of My Life (1902). Keller (1880–1968) presents the story of how she prevailed over deafness and blindness brought on by a childhood illness and learned to read and speak through the intervention of a progressive teacher, Anne Sullivan, who overcame her own physical disabilities and abandonment by her parents. In many respects, Helen's education by Anne is an early feminist parable—resonating with African American and immigrant autobiographies—about the capacity of women to educate one another and overcome seemingly natural limitations. With her teacher, Keller goes on to become famous and to contribute toward building new social institutions, such as the American Federation for the Blind, for previously neglected groups.

Lucy Larcom's A New England Girlhood: Outlined from Memory (1889) is partly an elegy for the lost New England of her youth, which Larcom eventually left behind to become a missionary teacher in the American West. Before leaving, however, she worked as a spinning girl in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, where she, along with many other young women, were for the first time paid for their work. They also attended lectures, produced newspapers and magazines, and participated in a kind of protofeminist community, which would vanish by the end of the century, as foreign immigrants replaced the more valued native-born workers. Like other biographers in the era of realism, Larcom sees herself as representative of the societal forces of her time; her work, however, also expresses the sense of loss that comes with modernization and the desire, characteristic of the local color movement, to preserve some memory of what regional cultures were like before the industrialization and urbanization that followed the Civil War. This tendency, of course, was not exclusive to women writers.

MODERNITY, LOSS, AND THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE SELF

The period between the Civil War and World War I was characterized by a sense of disruption and loss greater than any earlier period in American history. Many autobiographers were stimulated by a desire to return to a lost past in American history, which was analogous to the desire to revisit the experiences of childhood innocence. This shift can be seen in the paintings of Winslow Homer, from Civil War scenes to images of childhood such as Snap the Whip (1872), as well as pastoral scenes of hunting and depictions of traditional seaboard culture. A similar impulse is demonstrated by the novelist William Dean Howells (1837–1920) in A Boy's Town (1890), My Year in a Log Cabin (1893), and Years of My Youth (1916), as well as in the autobiographical works of Henry James (1843–1916) such as A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and The Middle Years (1917). James lamented the shallowness of American culture, but he repeatedly sought some explanation for his identity by meditating on the years of his childhood, which he describes as if he were actually reliving the experiences with an intensity acquired through adult understanding. In a period of rapid change and dislocation, in which authors felt the loss of a grounded identity, autobiographies reflected a larger impulse in American culture—a sense of an infinitely regressing past that was somehow better than the present.

In some respects, the American West, which was opened to full-scale settlement after the Civil War, provided a means of national rejuvenation: the process of settlement could begin anew, and those who remained in the East could fantasize about the durability of American innocence. Western local colorists such as Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, and Mark Twain epitomized and capitalized on this element of postbellum culture. Twain's semiautobiographical The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) present an antebellum American culture—regional, folksy, adventuresome, irreverent—to which many back east longed

HELEN KELLER'S THE STORY OF MY LIFE

Helen Keller's The Story of My Life is, possibly, the most influential autobiography written by an American woman, and it is a landmark work in disability studies. Blind and deaf from infancy, Keller describes how she learned to speak under the instruction of a progressive female teacher. In addition to its factual basis, Keller's account is an allegory of the circumstances of women achieving a public voice in the late nineteenth century.

It was in the spring of 1890 that I learned to speak. The impulse to utter audible sounds had always been strong within me. I used to make noises, keeping one hand on my throat while the other hand felt the movements of my lips. I was pleased with anything that made a noise and liked to feel the cat purr and the dog bark. I also liked to keep my hand on a singer's throat, or on a piano when it was being played. . . .

[My teacher's] method was this: she passed my hand lightly over her face, and let me feel the position of her tongue and lips when she made a sound. I was eager to imitate every motion and in an hour had learned six elements of speech: M, P, A, S, T, I. Miss Fuller gave me eleven lessons in all. I shall never forget the surprise and delight I felt when I uttered my first connected sentence, "It is warm." True, they were broken and stammering syllables; but they were human speech. My soul, conscious of new strength, came out of bondage, and was reaching through those broken symbols of speech to all knowledge and all faith.

No deaf child who has earnestly tried to speak the words which he has never heard—to come out of the prison of silence, where no tone of love, no song of bird, no strain of music ever pierces the stillness—can forget the thrill of surprise, the joy of discovery which came over him when he uttered his first word. Only such a one can appreciate the eagerness with which I talked to my toys, to stones, trees, birds and dumb animals, or the delight I felt when at my call Mildred ran to me or my dogs obeyed my commands. It is an unspeakable boon to me to be able to speak in winged words that need no interpretation. As I talked, happy thoughts fluttered up out of my words that might perhaps have struggled in vain to escape my fingers. . . .

All teachers of the deaf . . . appreciate the peculiar difficulties with which I had to contend. In reading my teacher's lips I was wholly dependent on my fingers: I had to use the sense of touch in catching the vibrations of the throat, the movements of the mouth and the expression of the face; and often this sense was at fault. In such cases I was forced to repeat the words or sentences, sometimes for hours, until I felt the proper ring in my own voice. My work was practice, practice, practice. Discouragement and weariness cast me down frequently; but the next moment the thought that I should soon be at home and show my loved ones what I had accomplished, spurred me on, and I eagerly looked forward to their pleasure in my achievement.

"My little sister will understand me now," was a thought stronger than all obstacles. I used to repeat ecstatically, "I am not dumb now." I could not be despondent while I anticipated the delight of talking to my mother and reading her responses from her lips. . . .

When I had made speech my own, I could not wait to go home. . . . Almost before I knew it, the train stopped at the Tuscumbia station, and there on the platform stood the whole family. My eyes fill with tears now as I think how my mother pressed me close to her, speechless and trembling with delight, taking in every syllable that I spoke, while little Mildred seized my free hand and kissed it and danced, and my father expressed his pride and affection in a big silence. It was as if Isaiah's prophecy had been fulfilled in me, "The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands!"

Keller, The Story of My Life, pp. 58–62.

to return, even if, as Twain abundantly shows, it was no better than the present (and might have been a good deal worse). Twain and other western regionalists created—and critiqued—an imagined national past in which time stood still and everyone had a deep-rooted sense of belonging in a place. That sense is reflected with less ambivalence in such autobiographical works as Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain (1903) and John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra (1911).

When Twain came to write his own autobiography, which was published posthumously in 1924, he acknowledged the artificiality of the process. There were many shameful incidents in his life that might make good stories, he said, but he could not bear to put them on paper. And for all his candor, Twain's fragmentary, episodic style suggests an unseen audience whose reactions he imagines and for whom he constructs himself as useful fiction. In some respects, Twain anticipates the modern suspicion surrounding autobiographical writing, with its reliance on a faulty memory and the manifold motivations—conscious and unconscious—for fabrication and concealment.

The Education of Henry Adams, written between 1905 and 1907 (privately circulated in 1907 but not published until 1918), is generally regarded as the end of the tradition of the self-made man and the beginning of modern autobiography. Adams (1838–1918) writes about himself in the third person, as if the present self had no connection to the past. The Education is an account of the author's intellectual development, though it is an education that leaves him ill equipped for life in the present. Although he came from a family in which it was almost assumed he would become president of the United States, historical forces relegated Adams to the sidelines of political power, making him merely an observer of the major events of his time. Perhaps the most complex experiment in American autobiography up to that time, The Education suggests that self-knowledge is impossible except through distance and detachment, and that as a result individuals are not free to choose their own destinies. One does not choose success; the self is a manikin constructed by historical forces such as the medieval conception of the Virgin or the dynamo of the machine age.

Although the Franklin model would remain the dominant form of self-representation throughout the twentieth century, intellectual writers—particularly as modernism replaced realism in the aftermath of World War I—could no longer believe in the possibility of self-determination and the heroic individualism that had characterized American autobiography for the previous century.

See alsoThe Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Biography; Civil War Memoirs; The Education of Henry Adams; The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant; The Promised Land; The Rise of David Levinsky; Success; Up from Slavery

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.

Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912.

Barnum, P. T. Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years'Recollections of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Hartford: J. B. Burr, 1869.

Berkman, Alexander. Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. New York: Mother Earth, 1912.

Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky: A Novel. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917.

Chesnut, Mary Boykin. A Diary from Dixie. New York: Appleton, 1905.

Douglass, Frederick. The Life and Times of FrederickDouglass. Hartford: Park, 1882.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903.

Grant, U. S. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. New York: C. L. Webster and Company, 1885–1886.

Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life. New York: Doubleday, 1902.

Larcom, Lucy. A New England Girlhood: Outlined fromMemory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889.

Pickens, William. Bursting Bonds; Enlarged Edition, TheHeir of Slaves. Boston: Jordan and More Press, 1923.

Riis, Jacob. The Making of an American. New York: Macmillan, 1901.

Twain, Mark. Mark Twain's Autobiography of Mark Twain. New York; Harper & Brothers, 1924.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1901.

Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days and Collect. Philadelphia: Rees Welsh, 1882. Reprinted in his Prose Works. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892.

Secondary Works

Andrews, William L. "Forgotten Voices of Afro-American Autobiography, 1865–1930." a/b: Auto/biography Studies 2 (fall 1986): 21–27.

Boelhower, William. "The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States." In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Paul John Eakin, pp. 123–141. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Burr, Anna Robeson. Autobiography, a Critical andComparative Study. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909.

Cawelti, John G. Apostles of the Self-Made Man: ChangingConcepts of Success in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Cooley, Thomas. Educated Lives: The Rise of ModernAutobiography in America. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976.

Couser, G. Thomas. Altered Egos: Authority in AmericanAutobiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Couser, G. Thomas. American Autobiography: The PropheticMode. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.

Cox, James M. Recovering Literature's Lost Ground: Essays in American Autobiography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Egan, Susanna. "'Self'-Conscious History: American Autobiography after the Civil War." In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Paul John Eakin, pp. 70–94. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Holly, Carol. "Nineteenth-Century Autobiographies of Affiliation: The Case of Catherine Sedgwick and Lucy Larcom." In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Paul John Eakin, pp. 216–234. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Howells, William Dean. "Editor's Easy Chair." Harper'sMonthly Magazine 119 (1909): 796–798.

Jelinek, Estelle C. The Tradition of Women's Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present. New York: Twayne, 1986.

Kaplan, Louis. A Bibliography of American Autobiographies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962.

Sayre, Robert F. The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin,Henry Adams, Henry James. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.

Sayre, Robert F., ed. American Lives: An Anthology ofAutobiographical Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

William Pannapacker