{"product_id":"classic-american-autobiographies-isbn-9780451471444","title":"Classic American Autobiographies","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe true diversity of the American experience comes to life in this superlative collection of autobiographies—including those of Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglas, Mark Twain, and more... \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eA True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson\u003c\/i\u003e (1682), perhaps the first American bestseller, recounts this thirty-nine-year-old woman’s harrowing months as the captive of Narragansett Indians.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin\u003c\/i\u003e (1771–1789), the most famous of all American autobiographies, gives a lively portrait of a chandler’s son who became a scientist, inventor, educator, diplomat, humorist—and a Founding Father of this land.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass \u003c\/i\u003e(1845), the gripping slave narrative that helped change the course of American history, reveals the true nature of the black experience in slavery.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eOld Times on the Mississippi \u003c\/i\u003e(1875), Mark Twain’s unforgettable account of a riverboat pilot’s life, established his signature style and shows us the metamorphosis of a man into a writer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eFour Autobiographical Narratives\u003c\/i\u003e (1900–1902), published in the \u003ci\u003eAtlantic Monthly\u003c\/i\u003e by Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird), also known as Gertrude Bonnin, provide us with a voice too seldom heard: a Native American woman fighting for her culture in the white man’s world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eEdited and with an Introduction by William L. Andrews \u003cbr\u003eand an Afterword by Paul John Eakin\u003c\/b\u003e | \u003cb\u003eWilliam L. Andrews\u003c\/b\u003e is the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Professor of American Literature at the University of Kansas. A prizewinning scholar of African-American literature, Andrews is the author of \u003ci\u003eTo Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865.\u003c\/i\u003e He is the editor of \u003ci\u003eCollected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt, Three Classic Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt, Three Classic African-American Novels, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe African-American Novel in the Age of Reflection: Three Classics. \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePaul John Eakin\u003c\/b\u003e, Ruth N. Halls Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, is the author of several books on autobiography, including \u003ci\u003eFictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eLiving Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative\u003c\/i\u003e. He is also the editor of \u003ci\u003eAmerican Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect.\u003c\/i\u003e | \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eINTRODUCTION\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAutobiography occupies “an astonishingly large proportion of the slender shelf of so-called American classics,” according to James M. Cox, one of the genre’s most astute critics. Cox suggests that this predominance has something to do with the fact that autobiography emerged as a literary form about the same time the United States came into being as a new nation. In a sense, we might say, autobiography and America were made for each other. The revolutions in the United States and shortly thereafter in France demanded a radically new form of self-expression. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s \u003ci\u003eConfessions \u003c\/i\u003e(written between 1764 and 1770 and published posthumously from 1781 to 1788) epitomized this new form in France, while Benjamin Franklin’s \u003ci\u003eAutobiography \u003c\/i\u003e(which its author left incomplete in 1789, a year before his death) came to represent a similar new departure in the eyes of Americans.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat made these books unprecedented, however, was not the fact that they had an autobiographical agenda. The literature of selfhood, what we have come to term “life writing,” had had a long and notable history before Rousseau and Franklin made their contributions to it. In the West, autobiography in the most general sense of the word is usually traced back to St. Augustine, who wrote his \u003ci\u003eConfessions \u003c\/i\u003eof sin and salvation between A.D. 397 and 401. It is not by accident that Rousseau’s autobiography bears the same title as Augustine’s. For all his individuality, Rousseau wanted his story to be recognized and valued as part of a distinguished tradition. Though some, he admitted, would see him as breaking with that tradition, Rousseau was convinced that he was actually fulfilling its most fundamental demand for an unsparing examination of self.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYet to speak of a tradition of \u003ci\u003eautobiography \u003c\/i\u003ein the time of Rousseau and Franklin is a little misleading, since the term was not known during either man’s life. It was not until 1809 that this amalgam of three Greek words meaning “self-life-writing” came into currency, having been coined apparently by the British poet Robert Southey in a review of Portuguese literature. Neither Rousseau nor Franklin thought of himself as writing autobiography as we understand it today. Franklin’s life story is known as his \u003ci\u003eAutobiography \u003c\/i\u003ebecause of the decision of editors who, well after Franklin’s death, preferred the more modern term to the more old-fashioned “memoir,” the word Franklin himself used to refer to his book. Rousseau and Franklin were traditional enough to affiliate themselves with two of the most established genres of life writing in Western literature: the confession—an inner-directed, soul-searching mode of self-examination—and the memoir—an externally focused history and justification of a public life. What was revolutionary about Rousseau’s \u003ci\u003eConfessions \u003c\/i\u003eand Franklin’s self-styled “Memoirs” was not the form in which each author addressed his world, but the ways in which each author reshaped and expanded his chosen form to create models of expression that forecast a new form: American autobiography.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom Augustine to Rousseau, the purpose of writing a confession was to take stock of oneself, morally and spiritually, so as to consider seriously the state of one’s relationship to God. In revealing one’s sins one broke down barriers between sinner and God and thus opened the door to divine redemption. Like Augustine, Rousseau was determined to confess as fully as possible his moral transgressions— and there were many of them—but unlike anyone in Christian confessional literature before him, Rousseau claimed special credit from his readers for baring his soul so completely, so honestly, so shamelessly. Instead of thanking God for leading him to confession, as Augustine did, Rousseau denounced society for forcing him to choose between his natural sense of right and the rules of conventional behavior. While admitting that at times he had violated the laws of God and the social order, Rousseau insisted that he should not be condemned by those more culpable than he, namely, those who had capitulated to society’s corrupt standards, against which he had struggled, in his view, so heroically. Anyone who would judge him, therefore, was probably hiding behind a mask of suspect respectability and was too false or too fearful to be as open and honest as Rousseau claimed he had proven himself to be. Through this line of argument Rousseau turned the confession of a socially alienated man into an act of self-justification for his own nonconformist individuality. In the end society, not the self, is weighed in the balance and found wanting in this immensely influential model for American autobiography.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat Franklin called his “Memoirs” also provided a precedent for American autobiography by presenting the life of a nobody who became a somebody, a provincial outsider who became a cosmopolitan insider, a poor boy who made good and then tried to advise others on how to do the same. Writing a memoir, an account of his rise to success and public leadership, was for Franklin a way of promulgating a view of the individual that stressed humanity’s potential to do good rather than its propensity to succumb to evil. Franklin did not look to divine redemption to set men free to do right, as Augustine did, nor did he hold with Rousseau that the individual’s innermost feelings and intuition would serve as his or her most reliable guide to the good. Instead, the pragmatic American placed his trust in common sense enhanced by a reasoned, systematic appraisal of what lay in the best interests of the individual and the social order together.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLike his Puritan New England ancestors Franklin believed that God’s will was for everyone to have a calling, a vocation, through which each person would seek not only to fulfill the self but also to benefit the community. Unlike Rousseau, Franklin wrote his autobiography to show how the needs and desires of self and society could be balanced and reconciled so that true progress for all could be effected. Franklin made his life illustrate how a respect for social norms helped him curb the excesses of unrestrained self-regard. At the same time the autobiography bears witness to Franklin’s conviction that individual leadership could provide the dynamism needed by the social order to enable it to improve. Thus Franklin’s example, though sometimes linked to such rampant individualists as Jay Gatsby, the gaudy hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, has little to do with the glorification of crass, single-minded self-seeking. Franklin’s story of how a colonial handyman remade himself into an American everyman is told with such mixed self-satisfaction and ironic self-deprecation that most readers are left wondering just how seriously to take Franklin as the archetypal American apostle of success.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFranklin’s retailing of his public successes along with his homely advice on how to make it in the world are not what is most original in the \u003ci\u003eAutobiography. \u003c\/i\u003eWhat is fundamentally new is that nowhere in his story does Franklin imply that the act of remaking oneself, the perpetual reinvention of one’s role and image in the social order, is in any way revolutionary or even abnormal—certainly not for an American. The real American, the true student of schoolmaster Ben, remakes himself not in spite of, or in opposition to, what America is but \u003ci\u003ebecause \u003c\/i\u003ehe is an American. America is the land of inventors, and the greatest of Americans is the self-inventor—and the self-reinventor.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe most famous expressions of American autobiography in the nineteenth century—such works as the \u003ci\u003eNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass \u003c\/i\u003e(1845), Henry David Thoreau’s \u003ci\u003eWalden \u003c\/i\u003e(1854), Mary Chesnut’s blend of Civil War novel and diary, composed in the early 1880s but published a century later as \u003ci\u003eMary Chesnut’s Civil War \u003c\/i\u003e(1981), and \u003ci\u003eThe Education of Henry Adams \u003c\/i\u003e(1907)—grew out of a hybridization of confession and memoir, self-revelation and self-celebration. Before the advent of autobiography in the United States, confession and memoir were seen as contrasting, even diametrically opposed, modes of life writing. The impulse to strip the psyche bare and to ask ultimate questions of the self led in one direction. The desire to represent the self in full dress, socially and historically, and to ask of it an accounting of its contribution to the making of the world steered a life history on quite a different course. Yet in the colonies and later the states of North America, the evolving ideology of democracy demanded that the self be regarded as both unique and typical, both the capital of its own spiritual sphere and the cohort of everyone else in the sociopolitical realm. Thus when Americans wrote autobiography they felt the need to explain and justify the self in accordance with inner \u003ci\u003eand \u003c\/i\u003eexternal identifications that were by no means easily reconciled. When the American who attempted autobiography was someone other than the white male, in whose interests the ideology of democracy had been designed, the problems of self-representation only intensified as questions arose about the legitimacy of one’s claim to selfhood and the willingness of the social order to claim one as a member.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese conflicting attitudes toward self and society that emerge in the confession and the memoir inform the classics of American autobiography. Those marginalized by race and sex seem to rely more on internal standards of self-evaluation and to picture themselves as pitted against hostile forces intent on robbing them of their carefully nurtured sense of inner worth. The African-American Frederick Douglass and the American Indian Zitkala-Sa, for instance, cast themselves in a Rousseauesque mold, demonstrating strong affinities with the idea that true individuality is forged in an inevitable struggle with the conformism and oppressiveness of a corrupt society. Douglass predicates the “resurrection” of his self-respect and his “manhood” on his hand-to-hand battle with a southern slave-breaker, the symbol of all that was tyrannical in the antebellum American social order. In her autobiographical essay, “Why I Am a Pagan” (1902), Zitkala-Sa takes a bold stand in publicly resisting the orthodox religion of most white Americans and even her own mother, a converted Sioux. Zitkala-Sa pities the Christianized Indians because they have lost their God, their sense of oneness with Nature, and in a cultural sense, themselves, in the process of accepting the white spiritual norm. What links Douglass and Zitkala-Sa to the confessional tradition is not an apologetic view of self but rather a sense of spiritual obligation to chart the self’s quest for fulfillment in accordance with its God-given mission—to resist white America’s denial of colored America’s identity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs a seventeenth-century Puritan minister’s wife, Mary Rowlandson believed that God had brought about her captivity by Narragansett Indians in order to test her faith and her moral fortitude. In her \u003ci\u003eTrue History \u003c\/i\u003e(1682), Rowland-son confesses her own waverings and weakness of will, but her story concludes with an affirmation of God’s redemptive power. Her experience in the wilderness teaches her to “stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord,” a message that she proclaims to her reader as a spokesperson for God. Rowlandson’s sufferings at the hands of the “heathen” give her special authority to tell her story and to call attention to herself \u003ci\u003eas \u003c\/i\u003eone of the favored of God. Yet the ultimate hero of Rowlandson’s story is God, who not only delivers her but enables her to read her individual experience as a verification of the principles that held the Puritan social order together. Rowlandson’s focus on her individual spiritual quest under the strain of alienation and captivity by the Other links her with the likes of Douglass and, ironically, Zitkala-Sa. But the dovetailing of that spiritual quest with the myths and ideals of the society Rowlandson longed to rejoin after her captivity anticipates the uses to which Franklin would put his autobiography.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMark Twain’s \u003ci\u003eOld Times on the Mississippi \u003c\/i\u003e(1875) shows more obvious affinities with the Franklinesque tradition. The former “cub,” or apprentice pilot, who reminisces about the antebellum heyday of steamboating, recalls his training in the art and science of riverboat piloting partly to celebrate a lost era in American history and partly to show how Sam Clemens became Mark Twain. To graduate from the provincial backwater of his boyhood and be accepted into the grand fraternity of Mississippi riverboat pilots was, for Mark Twain, a metaphoric expression of the American drive for success. Like young Ben Franklin, the unlikely hero of \u003ci\u003eOld Times \u003c\/i\u003emust undergo an initiation that prepares him for a world in which the prize goes to the quick-witted and the adaptable, not the stolid follower of conventional wisdom. Divested of the comforting dependencies of the landsman, the newly made riverman gains a new self-confidence, which enables him to supplant the pilot who taught him, and a new realism, which shows him how to navigate the ever-shifting currents of American life for himself. Thus like Franklin’s account of his own youthful development, Mark Twain’s initiation story becomes a living lesson in pragmatic American values, a guide for a society that renews and defines itself primarily by rejecting its guides.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePlacing the classic American autobiographies, whether by a Douglass, a Mark Twain, or a Zitkala-Sa, under a single rubric, either the confession or the memoir, can be a bit risky, however. What reader of Douglass’s \u003ci\u003eNarrative \u003c\/i\u003ewould deny that in some important ways this former slave’s autobiography incorporates a pattern of successes reminiscent of Franklin’s, particularly in the rise of the once-marginalized African-American to economic independence and public prominence? Certainly Douglass intended to offer his rebellion against slavery as a testimonial, an unconquerable selfhood arrayed against the inhumanity of the southern social order. Yet as the fugitive slave proudly recalls his resistance to exploitation in the South, he lays a claim to acceptance and integration in the socioeconomic order of the North, where presumably every self-respecting individual is recognized and rewarded regardless of skin color. Perhaps Douglass was a Rousseauesque autobiographer to his southern enemies and a Franklinesque one in the eyes of his northern supporters. Yet one might wonder: though Douglass had “that aversion to arbitrary power” that Franklin claims stuck with him throughout his adult life, would Franklin have counseled the outspoken black man to decry in such extreme ways the failures of his America to live up to the ideals that Franklin helped draft into the language of the Declaration of Independence?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSimilar questions about the dual allegiances of American autobiography arise when thinking about \u003ci\u003eOld Times on the Mississippi. \u003c\/i\u003eHow much does Mark Twain’s image of the imperious riverboat pilot have in common with Franklin’s idea of the democratic hero dedicated to the betterment of his fellows? It would seem that the pilot’s aristocratic disdain for the thinking and expression of ordinary landsmen affiliates him with a tradition of lordly individualism that Franklin would never have endorsed because it was inimical to the formation of a new egalitarian society. Yet the United States in its infancy was much different from the country that had gone through the trauma of a civil war. In the aftermath of that war, with the pieties of antebellum America open to challenge, Mark Twain’s vision of the pilot, “the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth,” may have been less an exercise in nostalgia than a prediction of what was to come in the rough-and-tumble world of the Gilded Age. The conclusion is inescapable in \u003ci\u003eOld Times \u003c\/i\u003ethat the pilot is (or at least makes every effort to be) a law unto himself; he desires power and status and will do what is necessary to ensure his possession of both. What the cub—and Mark Twain—are most fascinated by and long to emulate is the pilot’s authority, the power he wields through the art of his words. Though Franklin also argued the fundamental importance of effective writing and speaking to the man who wishes to get things done, by the time of Mark Twain there seems very little for the artist in language to do \u003ci\u003eother \u003c\/i\u003ethan live by his code and make sure that no one infringes on his territory. The initiation of the pilot thus becomes the story of the making of an artist as well, an artist whose loyalty is much greater to his mystique and his craft than to the society that views him from such an awed distance.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe autobiographical essays of Zitkala-Sa (published in the \u003ci\u003eAtlantic Monthly \u003c\/i\u003efrom 1900 to 1902) also deserve consideration as an example of the cross-breeding of confession and memoir in classic American autobiographical expression. Clearly the Sioux writer assumed the posture of the alienated, embittered critic of a racist social order whose imposition of “civilization” amounts to the destruction of the integrity of traditional Indian culture. Yet the moment Zitkala-Sa chose to write about herself in English, she could not help but identify herself to some extent as an assimilated Indian. Part of the confessional aspect of her story is her acknowledgment of her pursuit and attainment of some of the most treasured symbols of success imaginable to her white fellow-students in college. On the one hand, she chose to publish her autobiography in the \u003ci\u003eAtlantic, \u003c\/i\u003esynonymous with literary respectability among turn-of-the-century white Americans. On the other hand, she used her forum in the\u003ci\u003e Atlantic \u003c\/i\u003eto inveigh against the very culture that gave her the means to satisfy what she recalled as her youthful “ambition for Letters.” Thus the means of thinking about and writing autobiography became for the mature Zitkala-Sa both a blessing and a curse. When she returned to her Sioux mother dwelling on the prairie, she found little solace and even less direction in how to live as a culturally displaced and socially marginalized person in the twentieth century.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHad the Sioux writer been able to interpret her enticed captivity by white missionaries as a message from God to her people, as Mary Rowlandson understood her captivity by Indians in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, then Zitkala-Sa might have found a way to view her experience as meaningful to her peers and revelatory of some larger divine plan. But even though Mary Rowlandson’s narrative won a large readership partly because she could transform her tale of individual suffering into a parable of the redemption of Puritan society, a careful reading of her \u003ci\u003eTrue History \u003c\/i\u003ebetrays lingering uncertainties about what she had become after her long sojourn with the Other, the Indians. Rowlandson knew she had a society to return to, unlike Zitkala-Sa, whose captivity forecast the ultimate dispersal and demoralization of her family and her people. But like Zitkala-Sa, Rowlandson could not return to Puritan society the same person who left it. Despite her attempt to make her story conform to the official ideology of her God-fearing, Indian-hating society, Rowlandson could not help but show how her time among the Narragansetts had not only taught her spiritual lessons but had required her to re-create herself in response to a new reality. Here again Rowlandson prefigures the story Zitkala-Sa told of initiation into a new world, the result of which was both loss and discovery, distortion and insight, alienation and empowerment.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis complex, ambivalent response to initiation into a new self-consciousness is what underlies all the narratives collected in this text. The distinguishing features of this new consciousness cannot be easily generalized except by using the term \u003ci\u003eAmerican, \u003c\/i\u003ethough to invoke this national designation brings with it as many disadvantages as advantages. Certainly one cannot call the autobiographical writings of Rowlandson, Franklin, Douglass, Mark Twain, and Zitkala-Sa American in any normative sense, as though beneath all their differences they share some fundamental set of beliefs that bond them as typical or representative of true Americans. Yet perhaps one may still call these works classic American autobiographies in the sense that each tells a story fundamental to the ongoing myth of America, the story of the making of an American. Obviously the variety of these five writers’ initiation experiences and their diversity of outcome point up the multiple routes and resolutions of the process of making Americans in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, in some important respects these five narratives agree that America, however historically rendered or mythologically evoked, has been the self’s great arena, offering both unprecedented room for its expression and unimagined contingencies for its extinction. The themes of the making and the unmaking of Americans play off against each other in these narratives, and it is not always easy to say whether to be made or unmade is the more desirable condition.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man,” wrote Frederick Douglass at the climax of one of the most dramatic and memorable accounts we have of the making of an American hero. In Douglass’s \u003ci\u003eNarrative, \u003c\/i\u003ethe fight with Covey instances a sudden and thoroughgoing transformation: “However long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.” In \u003ci\u003eOld Times on the Mississippi \u003c\/i\u003eMark Twain describes a similar kind of sea-change in his outlook on life after developing a pilot’s perspective on life on the river. “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve.” With this wonderful insight and knowledge, the pilot becomes “entirely free,” self-liberated from the blinders and fetters that “master” everyone else. These representations of the making of Americans suggest how much influence a secularized form of the Protestant idea of conversion has had on American autobiography. From eighteenth-century religious tracts to today’s weight-loss advertisements, the familiar “before-and-after” representation of the self triumphant over its past promises Americans that they can be transformed profoundly and permanently by an act of will. No doubt Twain and Franklin and, in his own way, Douglass gave their America reason to believe in the national ideal of the new Adam regenerated by a new land and with an irresistible destiny to remake the world, politically as well as spiritually, in his own image.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the narratives of Mary Rowlandson and Zitkala-Sa, however, the idea of the American as a “made man,” who has undergone a liberating self-discovery and goes forth to ring greater changes on the world around him, receives, we might say, its unmaking. As the European version of the American Eve, Rowlandson experiences a profound unsettling of identity in her encounter with the Other, and one cannot see at the end of her narrative just how the person she has become will meld finally with the community from which she was separated. Though she assures herself that she has been saved and restored, she cannot help but acknowledge that “I can remember the time, when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together; but now it is otherwise with me.” Rowlandson’s sojourn in the wilderness brought her to frontiers of consciousness that she was not fully prepared to understand, let alone explain to her reader. “Oh the wonderful power of God that mine eyes have seen,” Rowlandson maintains, but what are the emotions that kept her sleeplessly weeping at night when everyone else in her house was peacefully asleep? If this hint of unexpressed, and perhaps unexpressable, anxiety is the sign of this former Englishwoman’s Americanization, then the popular male formulations of the making of Americans must be reconsidered to take it into account.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs a Native American version of the American Eve, tempted by whites with “big, red apples” who lure her to tragic knowledge in their eastern schools, Zitkala-Sa also tells a story of Americanization for which there seem to have been few if any models. In several important respects the Sioux writer is both converted and unconverted by her long encounter with white culture. “Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and God,” she states, yet somehow she preserved within her a “dream of vent for a long-pent consciousness.” Does that consciousness eventually find release through autobiographical expression? Zitkala-Sa assures her reader that after a long period of struggle and frustration she has embarked upon “a new way of solving the problem of my inner self.” Yet she does not state in her\u003ci\u003e Atlantic \u003c\/i\u003eessays what that solution was or whether she has been able to effect it fully. If the writing of her autobiography was the solution, did she consider the four essays she published in the \u003ci\u003eAtlantic \u003c\/i\u003esufficient to her purpose? Or were they just an opening address, a way of introducing herself and her project to a prospective American audience? We have no certain answer to these questions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePerhaps, however, our lack of clarity on these matters points to the larger significance of Zitkala-Sa’s experiment in autobiography. Her \u003ci\u003eAtlantic \u003c\/i\u003eessays, loosely knit together into an open-ended narrative that seems deliberately to leave many of its own questions unanswered, describe an American still in the making. From total identification with her Native American mother, Zitkala-Sa was remade, albeit reluctantly, into an exemplar of successful Indian assimilation into the white world. But her essays describe a mature woman emerging from the other end of this process of Americanization and seeking an alternative to it. She knows she cannot fully return to the people of her childhood, for they themselves have undergone a degree of Americanization in her absence, a process that, ironically, accentuates her sense of alienation and loss. Yet in explaining why she has become a “pagan,” an unbeliever, despite the religious indoctrination she received from whites and the pressure from her own people to conform to their recently adopted Christian faith, Zitkala-Sa represents herself as upholding an unchanging standard in the face of seemingly inevitable change. In order to be true to her Native American heritage, she must resist the changes demanded by the Euro-American ideology of uniformity. She must insist on her right to re-form herself in accordance with intuitive spiritual promptings, not external societal directives. Her deliberately incomplete record of her lonely efforts to reclaim and re-form herself forecasts the challenge that would face twentieth-century Americans who define themselves in opposition to their country’s accelerating demand for the finished article, the made man, the “well-adjusted individual.” Having been taught the bitter lessons of Americanization that few autobiographers before her had to reckon with, Zitkala-Sa tried to suggest a path beyond the dead end of being “made in [and by] America.” Her story speaks eloquently to the first priority of American autobiography—to show not just the making of an American but the necessity of making up for oneself what “American” must mean.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e—WILLIAM L. ANDREWS\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMARY ROWLANDSON\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAuthor of the first and most famous Indian captivity narrative in Anglo-American letters, Mary Rowlandson was born in Somerset, England, to Joan and John White, who were among the first settlers of the town of Lancaster in the Massachusetts Bay colony. Raised in New England, Mary White married Joseph Rowlandson, the Harvard-educated minister of the town, in 1656. For the next twenty years she attended to her duties as a mother of three and a minister’s wife. In 1675, war broke out between the confederated colonies of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Plymouth, and Connecticut and the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuck Indians. On February 10, 1676, Mary Rowlandson and her children were taken captive by a band of Narragansetts during a raid on Lancaster. Separated from her two older children almost immediately, Rowlandson lived and traveled with the Narragansetts for eleven weeks and five days before being released to colonial authorities. A year after her husband’s death in 1677 Rowlandson married a leader of the Connecticut colony. She died in 1711.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eA True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson \u003c\/i\u003ewas first published in 1682. The present text follows Amy Schrager Lang’s edition of the \u003ci\u003eTrue History \u003c\/i\u003ein William L. Andrews, \u003ci\u003eet al., \u003c\/i\u003eeds. \u003ci\u003eJourneys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives \u003c\/i\u003e(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Signet","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48338541478117,"sku":"NP9780451471444","price":10.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780451471444.jpg?v=1769572603","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/classic-american-autobiographies-isbn-9780451471444","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}