The Norton Book of American Autobiography

From Mary Rowlandson's story of her capture by Indians in the mid 17th-century to Mary Paik Lee's story of being a pioneer Korean woman in America at the beginning of the 20th century, the autobiographical form has provided vivid, intimate glimpses of daily American life and self-understanding. In this anthology, Jay Parini brings together a selection from over three centuries of the American democratic voice. Here are the voices of the Founding Fathers and African American slaves; of transcendentalists and suffragists; of ancestors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and many others; and a range of contemporaries, including Maxine Hong Kingston, Gore Vidal, Julia Alvarez, and Mark Doty.