| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Ann Fabian. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 255. $39.95.

The recent discovery and publication of The Bondwoman's Narrative—a nineteenth-century novel that may be the earliest by an African American and the only one written by a former slave—has drawn considerable public attention. In his attempts to document the novel's authenticity and to place it in its historical context, editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., turned to several scholars for advice, among them Ann Fabian. Fabian provided Gates considerable expertise in analyzing the text's mode of narration, a skill she applies to less glamorous but equally important texts in this book, a cultural history of how ordinary Americans crafted and sold their stories of hardship during the nineteenth century. 1

Fabian's book examines the tales of beggars, convicts, ex-slaves, prisoners, and others to explore cultural authority, veracity, and the nature and function of print media as the United States was shifting to a market economy. The origin of Fabian's work lies in her fascination with "Long Island Lolita" Amy Fisher, a recent tabloid sensation who discovered that the only asset she could hawk from jail was her story. Fabain links this contemporary instance to the nineteenth-century past, showing how "the very possibility of telling tales based on experience has been a refuge for the weak and ruined, a means for those deprived of power, authority, and education to come before the great public" (p. xii). . . .

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