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---. ed. Southern Selves: From Mark Twain and Eudora Welty to Maya Angelou and Kaye Gibbons. A Collection of Autobiographical Writings. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. Print.

ssss1 In the Introduction to his edited volume, Located Lives: Place and Idea in Southern Autobiography (1990), Bill Berry notes that “James M. Cox would add Franklin’s autobiography to his list of the ten major American prose works” (x).

ssss1 In her essay, “Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing the ‘Other,’” Betty Bergland explains that, because autobiography is a genre that “possess[es] ideological power . . . [and] serves a political function” (131), women and ethnic minorities who have written their life stories and constructed their selves from the position of the other, in fact, have used a “double-voiced discourse” (132).

ssss1 It should be noted, however, that Anne Firor Scott’s 1970 path-breaking book The Plantation Mistress led to the publication of several studies in the 1980s which dealt with the demystification of the role of the southern lady through autobiographical narratives like letters and diaries, although those studies had a sociological and historiographical, rather than literary, perspective.