An anthology of essays on autobiography, written by distinguished critics of the genre, featuring theoretical and historical discussions of autobiography; analyses of specific examples of European, Anglo-American, ethnic American, and women's autobiographies; a chronology; and a selected bibliography.

Historical overview of the autobiography. --1. Forms of autobiography. -- Cultural values necessary for the creation of autobiography / Georges Gusdorf ; -- Literary confession and its religious model / Susanna Egan ; -- Montaigne's Essays : a method of knowing the self / James Olney ; -- Memoir : the interior life meets the exterior world / Annie Dillard ; -- Autobiographical fiction : James Joyce and the artistic transformation of fact / Suzanne Nalbantian -- 2. Anglo-American autobiographies. -- History as personal experience / Alfred Kazin ; -- Many masks of Benjamin Franklin / Robert F. Sayre ; -- Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman : seeking the infinite self / Brian Harding ; -- The education of Henry Adams : neglected masterpiece / James M. Cox ; -- Norman Mailer : the novelist as public citizen / Albert E. Stone -- 3. Ethnic American autobiographies. -- Autobiographical conventions and ethnic American experience / James Craig Holte ; -- Power of literacy in Frederick Douglass's Narrative / Valerie Smith ; -- Testimonial and the blues : modes of African American autobiography / Elizabeth Schultz ; -- Invisible author of The autobiography of Malcolm X / John Edgar Wideman ; -- N. Scott Momaday : Native American autobiographer / H. David Brumble III -- 4. Women's autobiographies. -- Women's autobiography and the male tradition / Estelle C. Jelinek ; -- Politics, love, and personal integrity in Emma Goldman's Living my life / Blanche H. Gelfant ; -- Matrilineal bond in Margaret Mead's Blackberry winter / Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos ; -- Lillian Hellman and Anais Nin : masculine and feminine pitfalls of liberation / Patricia Meyer Spacks ; -- Song of a caged bird : Maya Angelou's quest for self-acceptance / Sidonie Ann Smith.