do not mitigate the disadvantages and sufferings of the daily lives of large numbers of Americans, but judging from the quantity of documents identified as autobiographies, it is not difficult to conclude that Howells's judgment was correct. For autobiography, in its valorization of individualism and its focus on the success story, has always been eminently suited to the dominant American temperament.
One of the attractions of autobiography for readers of popular literature is that, generally, Americans presume the absolute truthvalue of these texts and an authentic and direct contact with the authors through the written word. Such beliefs grant the form what Elizabeth Bruss described as 'empirical first-person' authority, and set the genre of autobiography hierarchically apart from other forms of narrative discourse.
Perhaps for this reason as well as for our innate curiosity about the lives of the famous and the successful, from its beginnings narrative autobiography flourished in America. Euro-Americans began recording their experiences in the new land in the early seventeenth century, and in the closing years of the twentieth century they continue to do so in unprecedented numbers, as ethnic and other minority groups, formerly excluded from recognition in letters, make their voices heard through this medium. But even excluding these aggressive newcom- 27- ers, by 1961, Louis Kaplan's A Bibliography of American Autobiographies listed more than 6000 titles recorded prior to 1945, and Mary Briscoe's American Autobiography, 1945–1980, adds 5000 titles to that list. In addition to the sheer numbers of individual selfwritten lives, these bibliographies demonstrate that the American autobiographical narrative accommodates itself to wide varieties of selfrepresentations — the conversion, captivity, criminal, slave, and travel narratives, ethnic, immigrant, colonial, and transcendental autobiographies, to name a small number of easily recognizable categories.
Interestingly, while writing-the-self began early in the country's history, the study of American narrative autobiography was slow in developing. In 1948, a book almost unnoticed by the literary establishment, Witnesses for Freedom: Negro Americans in Autobiography, by Rebecca Chalmers Barton, became the first full-length study of the genre. Barton's text, consisting of twenty-three textual portraits, with a foreword by Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke, included such figures as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Mary Church Terrell, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Sixteen years later, in 1964, The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James, by Robert F. Sayre, appeared, and set the stage for what was soon to become a new and almost instantaneously flourishing field of intellectual inquiry. Today, a multiplicity of critical texts, as wide- ranging in methodologies and interpretive intent as the varying content of the narratives they explore, makes up this burgeoning body of knowledge. These studies constitute a revolutionary reassessment of the relationship between self-representation and other branches of narrative literature.
This revolution has been immensely aided during the second half of the twentieth century by the explosions in literary theory and cultural criticism that, among other things, have led academic critics of American autobiography to define the 'I' and to call indiscriminate presumptions of truth-value in the genre into question. Even before this, scholars had discussed the position of autobiography as a hybrid of history and literature, and had come to interesting conclusions about the art of its narrative techniques. But in the new wave of criticism, scholars like Albert E. Stone, in Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts (1982), advanced the idea of the autobio-28- graphical act as occupying 'the frontiers of 'fact' and 'fiction,'' a viewpoint that helped to open up new avenues for destabilizing the once dominant 'I.' As Stone describes it, in straddling this frontier autobiography comprises a 'literary as well as a historical activity which recreates psychic as well as social experience,' simultaneously resisting complete appropriation by the disciplines to which it is connected. The richness of the autobiographical enterprise, he points out, rests in its blending of, and the tensions between, memory, reflection, and imagination. More recent studies in the genre have gone even further, as such works as Couser's Altered Egos, Paul John Eakin's Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (1985), and Herbert Liebowitz's Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography (1989) take advantage of poststructuralist discourse to further problematize the boundaries of the 'I.'
In his disputation of a fixed truth-value in autobiography, Couser takes issue with notions that the 'I' is first (prior), personal (private), or singular (unique), a position earlier and more conventional critics (primarily white males on white male autobiography) claimed. Couser's view, buttressed by the scholarship of social psychologists, is that the self is not constructed in isolation but continually engages in complicity, negotiation, and collusion in its relationships with others. This point of view inscribes difference in identity and acknowledges a contextually variable self that, although integrated, need not embody harmonic unity. Furthermore, memory, which is unstable, plays such an important role in the construction of autobiography that it unsettles the ground on which the truth of a narrative rests. Assuming the validity of this theory, how do we assess the relationship between American autobiography and the American novel in their development? A brief survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American autobiography through the end of the Revolutionary War, followed by a look at the slave narrative and Native American autobiography in the nineteenth century, provides an outline of early patterns in the development of fictional elements in autobiography in this country.
The earliest Euro-Americans to face themselves in writing were explorers in search of New World adventure. Psychologically, these men were attuned to the idea of psychic transformations as a result -29- of their contacts with the Americas. The literature of the period, partly intended to attract additional settlers to the new exotic country, while descriptive of the physical characteristics of the new land and giving accounts of its inhabitants, speaks also to the effects that the environment had on these men. Among these early impulses to create an American self distinct from the one that came out of the old country are the accounts left us by Captain John Smith, which include A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia (1608), A Description of New England (1616), The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624), and The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith (1630). One of the most well known events in this last-named text recounts Smith's capture by the Indians and his escape from death through the intervention of the princess Pocahontas. The singular importance of the story, in the context of the new 'self,' is the metaphorical rebirth of Smith who becomes, through Pocahontas's willingness to sacrifice her life to save him from the barbarousness of her people, the son of the Indian chief.
There is little doubt that John Smith met Pocahontas and her chieftain-father Powhatan. Among English settlers, however, the story of Smith's escape from death at the hands of the Indians was built on assumptions that as a white man he was superior to the natives, a superiority that Pocahontas and her father recognized. This belief was further reinforced by Pocahontas's subsequent marriage to another English settler. On the contrary, besides the fact that whites were killed by Indians previously — as well as subsequently — to Smith, therefore negating the idea that Indians believed in a theory of white superiority, recent anthropological evidence indicates that when Powhatan permitted Smith, through a ritual ceremony, to become a young 'white' chief, he used him to help him (Powhatan) in his trade for European goods and to strengthen his power base. Smith's was clearly a romanticized version of the events intended to capture the imagination of others with interests similar to his own, to lure them to the American colonies. The intent might have accomplished its goal, but this fictionalized appropriation of the Pocahontas story, the first legend of Euro-American colonialization, set the stage for the subsequent denigration of Native American intelligence and humanity. -30-
The secular stories of explorers like Smith find counterparts in the conversion narratives and Puritan histories, such as those of William Bradford (History of Plimmoth Plantation [1650]) and Edward Johnson (Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England [1654]). Although accorded the status of autobiographies, these texts more accurately represent collective community biographies that give all credit for the European settlement of the country to Divine guidance and providence, and set the ground rules for individual participation in the community. The best-known Puritan autobiographies are the Diary of Samuel Sewall (1673–1729) and the Diary of Cotton Mather (1681–1724). Mather also authored Paterna (1688–1727), an instructional document intended for his son, and Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), a history of the Puritan New England experiment. Other well-known spiritual autobiographies of the eighteenth century include Jonathan Edwards's Personal Narrative (ca. 1739), the Quaker writings of Elizabeth Ashbridge and John Wolman, and A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), the text that launched America's first unique autobiographical account: the Indian captivity narrative.
