Reviews of Books

The early American republic witnessed a vast outpouring of personal narratives, many by citizens of the new nation, others by visitors from overseas. Benjamin Franklin's account of his early life, which first appeared in 1793, may be the most famous, but it was hardly unique. Such narratives appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and books. Counting the books alone, Louis Kaplan and his collaborators listed almost 400 by authors born between 1776 and 1800 in A Bibliography of American Autobiographies (Madison, 1961). Not all autobiographical accounts came from successful people; they were written by beggars, convicts, slaves, and prisoners of war, as we are reminded by Ann Fabian's The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, 2000). Historians, more eager than ever to use personal documents in their classes and scholarship as a way of bringing the past to life, have seized on these narratives, as one can see from anthologies like Joyce Appleby's Recollections of the Early Republic: Selected Autobiographies (Boston, 1997) and Michael Morrison's The Human Tradition in Antebellum America (Wilmington, Del., 2000). For literary scholars, however, these sources can raise questions. What do these narratives teach us about the evolution of literary history? Into what genre or genres should they be classified?	1
Stephen Carl Arch's thoughtful book addresses these questions. Autobiography, as Arch sees it, is "any narrative written or told by one person in which that person struggles to tell the story of how he or she came over time to be an independent, often original, agent" (p. 6). He claims that the rise of romanticism was a precondition for authentic autobiographical writing, and so the genre did not, indeed could not, fully take shape in America until after the 1810s. American autobiography in the proper sense, he argues, was an aspect of the nineteenth-century project of "self-culture" as defined by William Ellery Channing and practiced by the New England Transcendentalists, who introduced Americans to European romanticism. While Arch does not comment on it, this represents a significant New World cultural lag. Rousseau's Confessions surely marks the beginning of the modern, romantic autobiography. But although an English translation promptly appeared in London in 1783, there was no American reprint of the Confessions before 1830, confirming Arch's sense of the late arrival of autobiographical romanticism in the United States.	2
Arch explains that he began his project by reading "all the first person narratives in this half century in the new United States that I could locate" (p. ix). Historians will regret that he offers no indication of how many this was or what fraction they might represent of the total number written. He does not mention Kaplan's Bibliography or tell us what alternative database he used. Writers whom he selects for close analysis here include not only famous figures such as Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Benjamin Rush, and Ethan Allen but also obscure ones such as the loyalist spy James Moody, the Federalist lawyer Alexander Graydon, the confidence man Stephen Burroughs, the inventor John Fitch, and the convention-defying female narrators Elizabeth Fisher and "K. White" (whose Narrative may be a hoax, although Arch doesn't think this matters). Besides helping define what is and what is not autobiography, Arch hopes to arouse interest in hitherto neglected "self-biographies" (his term for first person narratives that antedate autobiography proper). Through textual analysis he relates the rise of autobiography to the social and ideological situation of post-revolutionary America and shows how the development of modern media of print communication facilitated the relationship between an author and a mass readership in far-flung places.	. . .