American Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Writing

Front Cover
Robert F. Sayre
Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1994 - Biography & Autobiography - 732 pages

American Lives is a groundbreaking book, the first historically organized anthology of American autobiographical writing, bringing us fifty-five voices from throughout the nation's history, from Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Jonathan Edwards, and Richard Wright to Quaker preacher Elizabeth Ashbridge, con man Stephen Burroughs, and circus impresario P.T. Barnum. Representing canonical and non-canonical writers, slaves and slave-owners, generals and conscientious objectors, scientists, immigrants, and Native Americans, the pieces in this collection make up a rich gathering of American "songs of ourselves."


Robert F. Sayre frames the selections with an overview of theory and criticism of autobiography and with commentary on the relation between history and many kinds of autobiographical texts--travel narratives, stories of captivity, diaries of sexual liberation, religious conversions, accounts of political disillusionment, and discoveries of ethnic identity. With each selection Sayre also includes an extensive headnote providing valuable critical and biographical information.


A scholarly and popular landmark, American Lives is a book for general readers and for teachers, students, and every American scholar.

 

Contents

Explorers Governors Pilgrims
19
The General Historie of Virginia
27
Ulysses S Grant from Personal Memoirs
28
to her Children
39
Mary Rowlandson from A True History of the Captivity
46
Great Awakenings
69
Sarah Kemble Knight The Journal of Madam Knight
77
Elizabeth Ashbridge Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life
99
of Ulysses S Grant
409
Frederick Douglass from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
418
Lucy Larcom Mountain Friends
426
Andrew Carnegie How I Served My Apprenticeship
435
Lives in Progress 19001935
443
Jack London What Life Means to Me
451
Randolph Bourne The Handicapped
459
Mary Antin Initiation
472

Itinerant Minister in South Carolina
151
and Pretenders 17761837
173
Colonel Ethan Allens Captivity
181
Autobiography of John Adams and Discourses on Davila
191
of the Revolution
227
Stephen Burroughs from Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs
238
Black Hawk from Life of MAKATAIMESHEKIAKIAK
261
SelfLiberators 18361865
273
Jarena Lee The Life and Religious Experience
281
Ralph Waldo Emerson from The American Scholar
299
Lewis Clarke from Leaves from a Slaves
312
Margaret Fuller from Mariana
321
from Fannys Portfolio
329
P T Barnum from The Life of P T Barnum
338
Abraham Lincoln To Jesse W Fell Enclosing
350
Survivors and SelfTeachers 18651915
367
Warren Lee Goss from The Soldiers Story
375
Mary Boykin Chesnut from Diary during the War
394
John Muir The World and the University
483
W E B Du Bois The Shadow of Years
493
Roderick Seidenberg I Refuse to Serve
504
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Love and Marriage and The Breakdown
515
Experimental Lives 19201960
535
F Scott Fitzgerald The CrackUp
545
Gertrude Stein from The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans
558
James Agee from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
564
Richard Wright from The God That Failed
571
Dorothy Day Having a Baby and Love Overflows
582
Anaïs Nin from The Diary of Anaïs Nin
597
Quests for Identity 1960
609
James Baldwin The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American
621
Allen Ginsberg Kaddish
627
N Scott Momaday from The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Names
647
Annie Dillard from An American Childhood
691
A Reading List of Other American Autobiographies
711
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About the author (1994)

Robert F. Sayre, a leading authority on American autobiographical writing, is professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James and Thoreauand the American Indians. He is the editor of New Essays on Walden and Take This Exit: Rediscovering the Iowa Landscape.