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Finally, we would like to thank the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MEC) for funding (FFI2013-44747-P) this study.

Introduction

The Enduring Impulse to Tell about the Self and the South

Carmen Rueda-Ramos and Susana Jiménez Placer

Sincerely and earnestly hoping that this little book may do something toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds—faithfully relying upon the power of truth, love, and justice, for success in my humble efforts—and solemnly pledging my self anew to the sacred cause,—I subscribe myself, FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

—Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself (1845)

I think I have always known about my memory: I know when it is to be trusted and when some dream or fantasy entered on the life, and the dream, the need of dream, led to distortion of what happened.

—Lillian Hellman, Pentimento (1973)

In The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative (2007), American critic and memoirist Thomas Larson makes the following claim: “Despite the occasional female author, autobiography is a male genre” (12). After the initial shock, one is almost tempted to add—not without a heavy dose of irony, of course—the adjective white to his statement. In his brief overview of the history of the genre, citing Henry Adams’s Education of Henry Adams, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as classics that prove his point, Larson wipes out southern authors’ rich contribution to American autobiography by saying that it would be the quintessential American genre “were the form widely practiced. But it hasn’t been” (11). One wonders how could Larson possibly overlook and dismiss so easily the autobiographies and memoirs penned by southern African Americans and women, two historically oppressed groups who found precisely in the different forms of life-writing the means to represent themselves. Larson ignores the autobiographical impulse in the South that has produced countless letters, diaries, slave narratives, autobiographies and memoirs written by black and white southerners in general, and by southern women in particular. Worst of all, he disregards the right of authors like Frederick Douglass to form part of the select group of canonical autobiographersssss1 in the US, let alone acknowledge the literary relevance of writers like Lillian Hellman, who happened to be more than an “occasional female author” of memoirs. Wondering, therefore, if such an autobiographical impulse exists among southerners is not exactly the right question to ask, for the urge and the tradition to tell personal narratives certainly have been there for a long time.