Memoir’s American Roots
Memoir’s American Roots
This chapter attempts to identify and illuminate some precedents for the modern memoir in early genres and masterpieces of American literature. It shows that much early American literature was what may be called life writing today: letters, diaries, chronicles, and occasional poetry. The nineteenth century produced a number of precursors for modern memoirs, including Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast and Thoreau's Walden is more ambitious: it models an exemplary alternative lifestyle. The chapter also explores monuments or masterpieces of American life writing by Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Henry Adams, Henry James, and Gertrude Stein. It demonstrates that literary memoir is not a recent upstart: well before the twentieth century, American literature was rich in precedents for much of what has been hailed as valuable in contemporary memoir.
Keywords: American literature, American life writing, Richard Henry Dana, Thoreau, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Henry Adams, Henry James
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
