In this diverse and abundant selection, Parini brings together the classics in the tradition of American memoir with an astonishing variety of modern and contemporary writings.

Here are the voices of the Founding Fathers and of African American slaves; of transcendentalists and suffragists; of ancestors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, and many others; and of contemporaries including Maxine Hong Kingston, James Alan McPherson, Annie Dillard, Richard Rodriguez, and Kathleen Norris.

From Mary Rowlandson's story of her capture by Indians in the mid-seventeenth century to Sherman Alexie's unvarnished portrait of Native American experience in the mid-twentieth century, the autobiographical form has provided our literature's most vivid, intimate glimpses of daily American life and self-understanding.

This is a necessary book for writers and would-be writers in all genres considering their own autobiographies, and for readers of all kinds interested in how Americans have recorded their inner and outer landscapes.