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James Olney may be right in suggesting that there is no southern white autobiographical tradition in the sense that there are no major autobiographies from which all others are derived, no major texts that all southern autobiographers must take into account—in short, no autobiographical equivalent to Faulkner. (84)

Rather than pondering the different autobiographical traditions among black and white writers, William L. Andrews is more interested in exploring what four black and white southern authors from the Mississippi Delta have in common. In his essay “In Search of a Common Identity: The Self and the South in Four Mississippi Autobiographies,” Andrews discusses William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee (1941), Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), Willie Morris’s North Toward Home (1967), and Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) in order to find a “common identity” among them. Andrews notes that “[e]ach autobiographer conceived of his or her route to achieved selfhood differently” though “[n]one of these routes can afford to bypass the racial order” (43) and solve the “unresolved conflict with the self over one’s attitude toward” the other (42).