Classic American Autobiographies by William L. Andrews (English) Paperback Book

Description: Classic American Autobiographies by William L. Andrews, Paul John Eakin Originally published: New York: Mentor, c1992. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description A diverse collection of autobiographies from important Americans in history, now with a new afterword.The true diversity of the American experience comes to life in this superlative collection of autobiographies-including those of Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglas, Mark Twain, and more...A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson(1682), perhaps the first American bestseller, recounts this thirty-nine-year-old womans harrowing months as the captive of Narragansett Indians.The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin(1771-1789), the most famous of all American autobiographies, gives a lively portrait of a chandlers son who became a scientist, inventor, educator, diplomat, humorist-and a Founding Father of this land.Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass(1845), the gripping slave narrative that helped change the course of American history, reveals the true nature of the black experience in slavery.Old Times on the Mississippi(1875), Mark Twains unforgettable account of a riverboat pilots life, established his signature style and shows us the metamorphosis of a man into a writer.Four Autobiographical Narratives(1900-1902), published in theAtlantic Monthlyby Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird), also known as Gertrude Bonnin, provide us with a voice too seldom heard- a Native American woman fighting for her culture in the white mans world.Edited and with an Introduction by William L. Andrewsand an Afterword by Paul John Eakin Author Biography William L. Andrews is the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Professor of American Literature at the University of Kansas. A prizewinning scholar of African-American literature, Andrews is the author of To Tell a Free Story- The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. He is the editor of Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt, Three Classic Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt, Three Classic African-American Novels, and The African-American Novel in the Age of Reflection- Three Classics.Paul John Eakin, Ruth N. Halls Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, is the author of several books on autobiography, including Fictions in Autobiography- Studies in the Art of Self-Invention, Touching the World- Reference in Autobiography, How Our Lives Become Stories- Making Selves, and Living Autobiographically- How We Create Identity in Narrative. He is also the editor of American Autobiography- Retrospect and Prospect. Excerpt from Book INTRODUCTION Autobiography occupies "an astonishingly large proportion of the slender shelf of so-called American classics," according to James M. Cox, one of the genres most astute critics. Cox suggests that this predominance has something to do with the fact that autobiography emerged as a literary form about the same time the United States came into being as a new nation. In a sense, we might say, autobiography and America were made for each other. The revolutions in the United States and shortly thereafter in France demanded a radically new form of self-expression. Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Confessions (written between 1764 and 1770 and published posthumously from 1781 to 1788) epitomized this new form in France, while Benjamin Franklins Autobiography (which its author left incomplete in 1789, a year before his death) came to represent a similar new departure in the eyes of Americans. What made these books unprecedented, however, was not the fact that they had an autobiographical agenda. The literature of selfhood, what we have come to term "life writing," had had a long and notable history before Rousseau and Franklin made their contributions to it. In the West, autobiography in the most general sense of the word is usually traced back to St. Augustine, who wrote his Confessions of sin and salvation between A.D. 397 and 401. It is not by accident that Rousseaus autobiography bears the same title as Augustines. For all his individuality, Rousseau wanted his story to be recognized and valued as part of a distinguished tradition. Though some, he admitted, would see him as breaking with that tradition, Rousseau was convinced that he was actually fulfilling its most fundamental demand for an unsparing examination of self. Yet to speak of a tradition of autobiography in the time of Rousseau and Franklin is a little misleading, since the term was not known during either mans life. It was not until 1809 that this amalgam of three Greek words meaning "self-life-writing" came into currency, having been coined apparently by the British poet Robert Southey in a review of Portuguese literature. Neither Rousseau nor Franklin thought of himself as writing autobiography as we understand it today. Franklins life story is known as his Autobiography because of the decision of editors who, well after Franklins death, preferred the more modern term to the more old-fashioned "memoir," the word Franklin himself used to refer to his book. Rousseau and Franklin were traditional enough to affiliate themselves with two of the most established genres of life writing in Western literature: the confession--an inner-directed, soul-searching mode of self-examination--and the memoir--an externally focused history and justification of a public life. What was revolutionary about Rousseaus Confessions and Franklins self-styled "Memoirs" was not the form in which each author addressed his world, but the ways in which each author reshaped and expanded his chosen form to create models of expression that forecast a new form: American autobiography. From Augustine to Rousseau, the purpose of writing a confession was to take stock of oneself, morally and spiritually, so as to consider seriously the state of ones relationship to God. In revealing ones sins one broke down barriers between sinner and God and thus opened the door to divine redemption. Like Augustine, Rousseau was determined to confess as fully as possible his moral transgressions-- and there were many of them--but unlike anyone in Christian confessional literature before him, Rousseau claimed special credit from his readers for baring his soul so completely, so honestly, so shamelessly. Instead of thanking God for leading him to confession, as Augustine did, Rousseau denounced society for forcing him to choose between his natural sense of right and the rules of conventional behavior. While admitting that at times he had violated the laws of God and the social order, Rousseau insisted that he should not be condemned by those more culpable than he, namely, those who had capitulated to societys corrupt standards, against which he had struggled, in his view, so heroically. Anyone who would judge him, therefore, was probably hiding behind a mask of suspect respectability and was too false or too fearful to be as open and honest as Rousseau claimed he had proven himself to be. Through this line of argument Rousseau turned the confession of a socially alienated man into an act of self-justification for his own nonconformist individuality. In the end society, not the self, is weighed in the balance and found wanting in this immensely influential model for American autobiography. What Franklin called his "Memoirs" also provided a precedent for American autobiography by presenting the life of a nobody who became a somebody, a provincial outsider who became a cosmopolitan insider, a poor boy who made good and then tried to advise others on how to do the same. Writing a memoir, an account of his rise to success and public leadership, was for Franklin a way of promulgating a view of the individual that stressed humanitys potential to do good rather than its propensity to succumb to evil. Franklin did not look to divine redemption to set men free to do right, as Augustine did, nor did he hold with Rousseau that the individuals innermost feelings and intuition would serve as his or her most reliable guide to the good. Instead, the pragmatic American placed his trust in common sense enhanced by a reasoned, systematic appraisal of what lay in the best interests of the individual and the social order together. Like his Puritan New England ancestors Franklin believed that Gods will was for everyone to have a calling, a vocation, through which each person would seek not only to fulfill the self but also to benefit the community. Unlike Rousseau, Franklin wrote his autobiography to show how the needs and desires of self and society could be balanced and reconciled so that true progress for all could be effected. Franklin made his life illustrate how a respect for social norms helped him curb the excesses of unrestrained self-regard. At the same time the autobiography bears witness to Franklins conviction that individual leadership could provide the dynamism needed by the social order to enable it to improve. Thus Franklins example, though sometimes linked to such rampant individualists as Jay Gatsby, the gaudy hero of F. Scott Fitzgeralds classic novel, has little to do with the glorification of crass, single-minded self-seeking. Franklins story of how a colonial handyman remade himself into an American everyman is told with such mixed self-satisfaction and ironic self-deprecation that most readers are left wondering just how seriously to take Franklin as the archetypal American apostle of success. Franklins retailing of his public successes along with his homely advice on how to make it in the world are not what is most original in the Autobiography. What is fundamentally new is that nowhere in his story does Franklin imply that the act of remaking oneself, the perpetual reinvention of ones role and image in the social order, is in any way revolutionary or even abnormal--certainly not for an American. The real American, the true student of schoolmaster Ben, remakes himself not in spite of, or in opposition to, what America is but because he is an American. America is the land of inventors, and the greatest of Americans is the self-inventor--and the self-reinventor. The most famous expressions of American autobiography in the nineteenth century--such works as the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Henry David Thoreaus Walden (1854), Mary Chesnuts blend of Civil War novel and diary, composed in the early 1880s but published a century later as Mary Chesnuts Civil War (1981), and The Education of Henry Adams (1907)--grew out of a hybridization of confession and memoir, self-revelation and self-celebration. Before the advent of autobiography in the United States, confession and memoir were seen as contrasting, even diametrically opposed, modes of life writing. The impulse to strip the psyche bare and to ask ultimate questions of the self led in one direction. The desire to represent the self in full dress, socially and historically, and to ask of it an accounting of its contribution to the making of the world steered a life history on quite a different course. Yet in the colonies and later the states of North America, the evolving ideology of democracy demanded that the self be regarded as both unique and typical, both the capital of its own spiritual sphere and the cohort of everyone else in the sociopolitical realm. Thus when Americans wrote autobiography they felt the need to explain and justify the self in accordance with inner and external identifications that were by no means easily reconciled. When the American who attempted autobiography was someone other than the white male, in whose interests the ideology of democracy had been designed, the problems of self-representation only intensified as questions arose about the legitimacy of ones claim to selfhood and the willingness of the social order to claim one as a member. These conflicting attitudes toward self and society that emerge in the confession and the memoir inform the classics of American autobiography. Those marginalized by race and sex seem to rely more on internal standards of self-evaluation and to picture themselves as pitted against hostile forces intent on robbing them of their carefully nurtured sense of inner worth. The African-American Frederick Douglass and the American Indian Zitkala-Sa, for instance, cast themselves in a Rousseauesque mold, demonstrating strong affinities with the idea that true individuality Details ISBN045147144X Pages 496 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc ISBN-10 045147144X ISBN-13 9780451471444 Format Paperback Imprint Signet Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Short Title CLASSIC AMER AUTOBIOGRAPHIES Language English Media Book DEWEY B UK Release Date 2014-12-02 Year 2014 Publication Date 2014-12-02 US Release Date 2014-12-02 Author Paul John Eakin Edited by William L. Andrews Birth 19710116 Affiliation Ryan Ferguson Position Owner Qualifications M.D. Replaces 9780451529152 Audience General NZ Release Date 2015-01-27 AU Release Date 2015-01-27 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:141701660;

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