Book Review

Ann Fabian rescues from obscurity a disparate cast of compelling storytellers who published autobiographical narratives during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some beggars, convicts, slaves, prisoners of war, and working-class girls obtained, albeit briefly, the cultural authority of print, "but it was a vexed and contingent authority, dependent on a pose of humility and a pledge to forego art." They invariably depended upon more prosperous, learned, and respectable editors, publishers, and "experts" to authenticate, frame, and print their words.

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Although Fabian recapitulates many fascinating tales of woe, she primarily explores the cultural constraints imposed on the obscure authors. She does not venture beyond the publications by or about them to seek their biographical traces in unpublished, archival documents. For example, Fabian leaves mysterious the background, identity, and even the existence of one of her key characters, Robert Adams, the supposed author of a shipwrecked sailor's travels to Timbuktu. Instead of leaving such an important question open, Fabian might have probed local records—such as probate records, the census, and tax lists—to test the narrator's claims that he originated as a sailmaker's son in Hudson, New York. But Fabian balks at performing the role of authenticator that she so keenly detects and dissects in the past.

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