Volume 36, Number 19 · December 7, 1989
Me, Myself, and I
By E.A.J. Honigmann
Studies in Autobiography
edited by James Olney
Oxford University Press, 228 pp., $24.95
Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography
by Herbert Leibowitz
Knopf, 386 pp., $24.95
Saint Augustine wrote his Confessions—perhaps the first 'modern' autobiography—around 400 AD. No one knows how many thousands of autobiographies were produced thereafter, but it is generally agreed that our understanding of the genre only took off about thirty years ago. 'Prior to the mid-1950s,' says Mr. Olney, 'autobiography was seen as little more than a special variety of biography and as a kind of stepchild of history and literature.' Now the autobiographer's backward looking apparently has a golden future, having been 'elevated to the status of a discussion-group subject by the MLA Program Committee, and so [it] will enjoy a guaranteed, continuing presence on the program of the annual MLA convention,' a form of immortality.
Review, 3307 words
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