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This volume, the original version of which was published in 1988, brings to a close the autobiographical writings of a modern Christian philosopher who lived through the two World Wars and the ecclesiastical upheaval in the Catholic Church in the context of the Second Vatican Council. What stamps this philosopher throughout the course of his life – with all its social and political uncertainties – is his constant dedication to truth and his manifest unswerving integrity.

Themes with which the reader of his previous works would be well acquainted recur in this volume. The dedicated Catholic philosopher, who preferred his independence as a trainer of teachers to the less independent role of a professor in a Catholic university, was quite prepared to criticize developments in the Church which resulted from Vatican II. In his defense of the sacred, which he deemed threatened by popularizing trends in the Church, he criticized what he saw as the watered down language in modern German translations of Church liturgical texts; the growing preference for secular garb; and the compromising developments which saw the sacramental signs – surrounding baptism, for instance – being reduced to such an extent that they no longer had the power to signify their sacred meaning even to a well-intentioned congregation.

A great lover of the philosophy of Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas – among many others –, Pieper highlighted the need for living a life of truth. He did not consider truth to be merely something abstract but as something to be lived existentially. While he could explain his philosophy in clear rational terms, something which especially stood to him in his post-war lectures to eager students who were hungry for intellectual guidance and leadership, the great interest of his philosophy was, possibly, his preoccupation with mystery – that which impinges on our inner lives but frustrates all our attempts to account for it in purely rational terms.

As a philosopher – one might say a Christian philosopher – Pieper seems to have observed the traditional boundaries drawn between philosophy and theology. His generation was exposed to the modernist debates in the Church. It would have been deemed heretical to say that the Divine could be grasped by our purely human thought processes – access to the Divine being only possible through faith and grace. Pieper was no heretic. But he was also not altogether conservative. In fact, his philosophy, closely allied to existentialism – despite his care, for instance, to distance himself from the negative existentialism of Sartre – focused on the individual’s inner existential grasp of the most profound reality. Truth is to be found within us, even if it remains a mystery. What lies beyond death is, for the individual, the ultimate mystery.

Ralph J. Roberts is not a household name in Nevada, but it should be—it was he who discovered the Carlin Belt gold deposits that created a major mining boom in the state in the last four decades of the twentieth century. But this discovery was only one episode of his remarkably eventful life. This colorful and personal account of the author's search for his passion—gold—is a story as adventurous as that of any fictional character.

Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X—their words speak firmly, eloquently, personally of the impact of white America on the lives of African-Americans. Black autobiographical discourses, from the earliest slave narratives to the most contemporary urban raps, have each in their own way gauged and confronted the character of white society. For Crispin Sartwell, as philosopher, cultural critic, and white male, these texts, through their exacting insights and external perspective, provide a rare opportunity, a means of glimpsing and gaining access to contents and core of white identity.

There is, Sartwell contends, a fundamental elusiveness to that identity. Whiteness defines itself as normative, as a neutral form of the human condition, marking all other forms of identity as "racial" or "ethnic" deviations. Invisible to itself, white identity seeks to define its essence over and against those other identities, in effect defining itself through opposition and oppression. By maintaining fictions of black licentiousness, violence, and corruption, white identity is able to cast itself as humane, benevolent, and pure; the stereotype fabricates not only the oppressed but the oppressor as well. Sartwell argues that African-American autobiography perceives white identity from a particular and unique vantage point; one that is knowledgeable and intimate, yet fundamentally removed from the white world and thus unencumbered by its obfuscating claims to normativity.

Throughout this provocative work, Sartwell steadfastly recognizes the many ways in which he too is implicated in the formulation and perpetuation of racial attitudes and discourse. In Act Like You Know, he challenges both himself and others to take a long, hard look in the mirror of African-American autobiography, and to find there, in the light of those narratives, the visible features of white identity.

Menacing, nerve-racking, uncomfortably intrusive, the high school reunion has become a dreaded encounter with past and present for many Americans. It is a moment of both heightened self-awareness and public presentation, insisting that we account for ourselves, not merely to our own satisfaction, but to the satisfaction of others as well. For sociologist Vinitzky-Seroussi, the high school reunion presents an ideal forum in which to explore the ongoing construction of identity in American society, and, perhaps, to ascertain just how we have managed to make sense of our lives, from then to now.

As autobiographical occasions, reunions prompt us to examine our own life narratives, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we have come to be that person. But at the same time, they can threaten the integrity of those very stories, subjecting them to the scrutiny of others whose memories of the past and ourselves may be altogether different from our own. Reunions, then, engender a fragile community held together by the resources of a shared past, yet imperiled by the tensions of competing histories. Inevitably—for both those who attend and those who choose not to—the reunion forces a kind of biographical confrontation, an unavoidable and often pivotal engagement between a carefully constructed personal identity and the socially prevalent standards of success and accomplishment.

Though many see in today's culture the gradual demise of personal identity, Vinitzky-Seroussi's carefully researched study reveals something quite different— After Pomp and Circumstance explores a struggle we all experience: the desire to resolve the tension between public conceptions and internal understandings, to maintain a sense of continuity between past and present lives, and to lay claim to both an integrated self and a unified life history.

Americans enjoy longer lives and better health, yet we are becoming increasingly obsessed with trying to stay young. What drives the fear of turning 30, the boom in anti-aging products, the wars between generations? What men and women of all ages have in common is that we are being insidiously aged by the culture in which we live.

In this illuminating book, Margaret Morganroth Gullette reveals that aging doesn't start in our chromosomes, but in midlife downsizing, the erosion of workplace seniority, threats to Social Security, or media portrayals of "aging Xers" and "greedy" Baby Boomers. To combat the forces aging us prematurely, Gullette invites us to change our attitudes, our life storytelling, and our society. Part intimate autobiography, part startling cultural expose, this book does for age what gender and race studies have done for their categories. Aged by Culture is an impassioned manifesto against the pernicious ideologies that steal hope from every stage of our lives.

In this frank and informative autobiography, the veteran investigative journalist Ida M. Tarbell looks back on her nearly fifty-year career. At the age of eighty-two, one of the original muckrakers writes with her characteristic candor about a life spent defying categories and challenging complacency.
 
Tarbell was the only woman in her class of forty students at Allegheny College, and upon graduation she began an internship at The Chautauquan, which was the start of a lifelong immersion in the world of journalism. She further honed her skills during a three-year stint in Paris, but the breakthrough came in 1894 when she was hired as a full-time writer for McClure's Magazine.
 
It was at McClure's--where, again, she was the only woman on staff--that Tarbell made her name as a determined journalist, one of the fearless brigade of truth-seekers famously chastised by Theodore Roosevelt, who coined the term ‘muckraker' in order to discredit those who attacked senators in print. Tarbell wrote serialized biographies of Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, as well as a landmark series of articles on Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller.
 
In All in the Day's Work, Tarbell turns her keen eye on herself, recalling the events of her fascinating life with the same honesty, verve, and scrupulous accuracy she brought to her journalistic work, offering insight along the way into the people, places, and issues of her time.
 

In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, American memoirists have wrestled with a wide range of anxieties in their books. They cope with financial crises, encounter difference, or confront norms of identity. Megan Brown contends that such best sellers as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, and Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell teach readers how to navigate a confusing, changing world.
            This lively and theoretically grounded book analyzes twenty-first-century memoirs from Three Cups of Tea to Fun Home, emphasizing the ways in which they reinforce and circulate ideologies, becoming guides or models for living. Brown expands her inquiry beyond books to the autobiographical narratives in reality television and political speeches. She offers a persuasive explanation for the memoir boom: the genre as a response to an era of uncertainty and struggle.

The first four essays review the major historical periods of American autobiography, placing the classic texts of American autobiographical literature from Captain John Smith to Malcolm X in the illuminating context of lesser-known contemporary narratives.  Daniel B. Shea writes on colonial America, Lawrence Buell on the American Renaissance, Susanna Egan on the years after the Civil War, and Albert E. Stone on the twentieth century.
    The second part of American Autobiography  shows the diversity of voices, forms, audiences, and modes of identity in the literature of American autobiography.  Provocative essays by William Boelhower and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong on immigrant autobiography discuss the changes in the sense of self that occur when strangers come to a strange land.  Arnold Krupat writes about how American Indians conceptualize the self and about the relationship between oral and written discourse.  William L. Andrews evaluates the strong body of critical theory that has grown up around African-American autobiography, showing how both the genre and its criticism have responded to contemporary historical pressures.  Carol Holly explores the model of personal identity that underlies nineteenth-century women’s autobiographies, and Blanche Gelfant examines the narrative and political strategies of Emma Goldman’s autobiography, especially her use of popular romance and melodrama. 
    The last essay offers a more personal perspective on contemporary autobiography:  a “dialogue” between Robert and Jane Coles about how they developed their method of eliciting first-person oral narratives for their famous Children of Crisis and Women of Crisis series.
    These essays raise  theoretical issues that are examined in Paul John Eakin’s incisive introduction:  How do we define a literary genre of protean shape and perplexing cultural multiplicity?  How do we approach the special problems created by documents that are both historical and literary texts, ones that pose difficult questions about truth and representation?  Most important, how is the canon of American autobiography to be constructed, and how is its history to be written?  Tracing that critical history, Eakin explains how changing ideas about “the mainstream” and “the marginal” have revitalized our retrospective view of American autobiography and opened up new and exciting prospects for today’s reader.

Edith Guerrier (1870-1958) embodied the ideals of the "New Women" who emerged by the thousands in turn-of-the-century America to take advantage of greater economic and educational opportunities for their sex. At the age of twenty-one, she began working with children in a settlement house in Boston's North End, where she soon maintained a reading room and a Boston Public Library delivery station. A pioneer in the new field of librarianship just opening to women, she founded many library clubs and eventually became the supervisor of branch libraries in Boston. Guerrier is perhaps best remembered for her work on behalf of young immigrant women in Boston's North End. Among the numerous "girls" clubs she founded was the Saturday Evening Girls, composed of young women of Jewish and Italian ancestry. Wanting to do more than simply "keep the girls off the street," she devised a plan to enable her charges to become financially self-sufficient. In 1908, with her lifelong companion Edith Brown, she began to develop what eventually became the Paul Revere Pottery. Potters worked an eight-hour day in an airy, healthful atmosphere, and received a decent wage, an annual paid vacation, and a daily hot lunch--all of which were virtually unheard of in the early twentieth-century workplace. Paul Revere Ware today is valued as a collector's item. Guerrier's autobiography has never been published. Her story takes us from her New England girlhood through her years on the midwestern frontier, to her education at Vermont Methodist Seminary and Female College, and finally through her odyssey in Boston, where she lived for most of her adult life. Molly Matson provides an introduction that examines Guerrier's life and several careers and discusses the history of turn-of-the-century Boston. In a substantive foreword, Polly Welts Kaufman situates Guerrier's autobiography within the context of recent scholarship on the changing roles of women during this period of American history.

Who writes "I"? To whom are autobiographies addressed? What kinds of readers are inscribed in autobiographical narratives? In Apology to Apostrophe, James D. Fernández's offers a lucid and powerful meditation on the nature of autobiographical writing through his investigation of the historical conditions and literary stagings of autobiographical writing in Spain.
As Fernández demonstrates, recent developments in critical theory provide new and fruitful approaches to autobiographical works that have long been neglected, misunderstood, or, in some cases, virtually unknown. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on nineteenth-century Spain, Fernández exposes a rhetorical tension that often occurs in autobiographical discourse, between self-justification, or "apology," and the transcendence of this worldly impulse, or "apostrophe." This tension, he argues, is of particular interest in the case of Spain, but not peculiar to that nation, and his attention to the theoretical nature of autobiography leads to insightfl considerations of many canonical European autobiographies, including those of Saint Augustine, Rousseau, Saint Teresa, and Cardinal Newman.
Considering Spanish autobiography in the context of first-person narrative in Europe and in the terms of current debates on the relationship between writing and selfhood, Apology to Apostrophe marks a significant advance in our historical understanding and critical discussion of the genre. The book will be of great value not only to Hispanists but also to those interested in autobiography and cultural history.

In this impressively interdisciplinary study, Evelyne Ender revisits master literary works to suggest that literature can serve as an experimental laboratory for the study of human remembrance. She shows how memory not only has a factual basis but is inseparable from fictional and aesthetic elements. Beautifully written in accessible prose, and impressive in its scope, the book takes up works by Proust, Woolf, George Eliot, Nerval, Lou Andreas-Salome, and Sigmund Freud, getting to the heart of essential questions about mental images, empirical knowledge, and the devastations of memory loss in ways that are suggestive and profound. Architexts of Memory joins a growing body of work in the lively field of memory studies, drawing from clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology as well as literary studies.

"An important, cogently argued, subtle and rich study of a topic of great interest."
--Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam

"A work of literary studies positioned at the intersection of tradition and innovation. Evelyne Ender's book brings fashionable cultural concerns to bear on traditional literary texts-her superb pedagogical skills lure and guide the reader through the most difficult psychoanalytical concepts."
--Nelly Furman, Cornell University

Evelyne Ender is Professor of French Studies, University of Washington. She is the author of Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria.

As If: An Autobiography traces the complex life and career of director, scholar, and theorist Herbert Blau, one of the most innovative voices in the American theater. From his earliest years on the streets of Brooklyn, with gang wars there, to the often embattled, now-legendary Actor's Workshop of San Francisco, the powerfully told story of Blau's first four decades is also a social history, moving from the Great Depression to the cold war, with fallout from "the balance of terror" on what he once described in an incendiary manifesto as The Impossible Theater.

Blau has always forged his own path, from his activist resistance to the McCarthy witch hunts to his emergence as a revolutionary director whose work included the controversial years at The Workshop, which introduced American audiences to major playwrights of the European avant-garde, including Brecht, Beckett, Genet, and Pinter. There is also an account here of that notorious production of Waiting for Godot at the maximum-security prison at San Quentin, which became the insignia of the Theater of the Absurd.

Blau went on from The Workshop to become codirector of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, and then founding provost of California Institute of the Arts, where he developed and became artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN. Currently Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington, Blau has been visionary in the passage from theater to theory, and his many influential and award-winning books include The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000; Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett; Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion; To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance; The Audience; The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern; and Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point.

This richly evocative book includes never-before-published photographs of the author, his family and friends, collaborators in the theater, and theater productions.

Authoring the Past surveys medieval Catalan historiography, shedding light on the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and authorship, and on the links between history and politics during the period. Jaume Aurell examines texts from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century—including the Latin Gesta comitum Barcinonensium and four texts in medieval Catalan: James I’s Llibre dels fets, the Crònica of Bernat Desclot, the Crònica of Ramon Muntaner, and the Crònica of Peter the Ceremonious—and outlines the different motivations for the writing of each. 

For Aurell, these chronicles are not mere archaeological artifacts but rather documents that speak to their writers’ specific contemporary social and political purposes. He argues that these Catalonian counts and Aragonese kings were attempting to use their role as authors to legitimize their monarchical status, their growing political and economic power, and their aggressive expansionist policies in the Mediterranean. By analyzing these texts alongside one another, Aurell demonstrates the shifting contexts in which chronicles were conceived, written, and read throughout the Middle Ages.

The first study of its kind to make medieval Catalonian writings available to English-speaking audiences, Authoring the Past will be of interest to scholars of history and comparative literature, students of Hispanic and Romance medieval studies, and medievalists who study the chronicle tradition in other languages.

Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines reveals the extraordinary breadth of the intellectual movement toward self-inclusive scholarship. Presenting exemplary works of criticism incorporating personal narratives, this volume brings together twenty-seven essays from scholars in literary studies and history, mathematics and medicine, philosophy, music, film, ethnic studies, law, education, anthropology, religion, and biology. Pioneers in the development of the hybrid genre of personal scholarship, the writers whose work is presented here challenge traditional modes of inquiry and ways of knowing. In assembling their work, editors Diane P. Freedman and Olivia Frey have provided a rich source of reasons for and models of autobiographical criticism.

The editors’ introduction presents a condensed history of academic writing, chronicles the origins of autobiographical criticism, and emphasizes the role of feminism in championing the value of personal narrative to disciplinary discourse. The essays are all explicitly informed by the identities of their authors, among whom are a feminist scientist, a Jewish filmmaker living in Germany, a potential carrier of Huntington’s disease, and a doctor pregnant while in medical school. Whether describing how being a professor of ethnic literature necessarily entails being an activist, how music and cooking are related, or how a theology is shaped by cultural identity, the contributors illuminate the relationship between their scholarly pursuits and personal lives and, in the process, expand the boundaries of their disciplines.

Contributors:

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Ruth Behar
Merrill Black
David Bleich
James Cone
Brenda Daly
Laura B. DeLind
Carlos L. Dews
Michael Dorris
Diane P. Freedman
Olivia Frey
Peter Hamlin
Laura Duhan Kaplan
Perri Klass
Muriel Lederman
Deborah Lefkowitz
Eunice Lipton
Robert D. Marcus
Donald Murray
Seymour Papert
Carla T. Peterson
David Richman
Sara Ruddick
Julie Tharp
Bonnie TuSmith
Alex Wexler
Naomi Weisstein
Patricia Williams

Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. Autobiography and Decolonization is the first book to give serious academic attention to autobiographies of nationalist leaders in the process of decolonization, attending to them not simply as partial historical documents, but as texts involved in remaking the world views of their readers.

            Holden examines Mohandas K. Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Marcus Garvey’s fragmentary Autobiography,Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound, Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography, and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana:The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah.

            Holden argues that these examples of life writing have had significant influence on the formation of new, and often profoundly gendered, national identities. These narratives constitute the nation less as an imagined community than as an imagined individual. Moving from the past to the promise of the future, they mediate relationships between public and private, and between individual and collective stories. Ultimately, they show how the construction of modern selfhood is inextricably linked to the construction of a postcolonial polity.

When María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, “rose up in wrath.” Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela’s experience, told in her own words, reveals her shrewd understanding of the persuasive power of a woman’s body.

Exploring the connections between autobiography and postmodernism, this book addresses self-representation in a variety of literature—Native American, British, Chicana, immigrant, and lesbian, among others—in genres as diverse as poetry, naming, and confession, photography, and the manifesto. The essays examine how different writers respond to the culturally specific pressures of genre, how these constraints are negotiated, and what self-representation reveals about the politics of identity.

In contrast to those critics of postmodernism who fear the dissolution of the active subject, the contributors here demonstrate that autobiography gives postmodernism a discourse through which to theorize human agency. The autobiographical subject that emerges is not the decentered human agent of so many versions of postmodernism but the producer of texts that call attention to the contradictions in dominant modes of self-representation and demonstrate the possibilities of writing from from other locations.

Contributors are Betty Bergland, Andrei Codrescu, Michael M. J. Fischer, Leigh Gilmore, David P. Haney, Paul Jay, Shirley Neuman, Christopher Ortiz, Sidonie Smith, Kirsten Wasson, and Hertha D. Wong.

Autobiography in Early Modern Spain was first published in 1991. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Autobiography in Early Modern Spain Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens, Editors

Introduction. The Construction of the Self: Notes on Autobiography in Early Modern Spain

Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens

Chapter 1. Narration and Argumentation in Autobiographical Discourse Antonio Gomez-Moriana

Chapter 2. A Clown at Court: Francesillo de Zuniga's Cronica burlesca George Mariscal

Chapter 3. A Methodological Prolegomenon to a Post-Modernist Reading of Santa Teresa's Autobiography

Patrick Dust

Chapter 4. Golden Age Autobiography: The Soldiers Margarita Levisi

Chapter 5. The Picaresque as Autobiography: Story and History Edward Friedman

Chapter 6. The Historical Function of Picaresque Autobiographies: Toward a History of Social Offenders

Anthony N. Zahareas

Chapter 7. Fortune's Monster and the Monarchy in Las relaciones de Antonio Perez Helen H. Reed

Chapter 8. The Woman at the Border: Some Thoughts on Cervantes and Autobiography Ruth El Saffar

Chapter 9. Poetry as Autobiography: Theory and Poetic Practice in Cervantes Jenaro Talens

Appendix Curriculum vitae

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Rigoberto González, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, takes a second piercing look at his past through a startling new lens: hunger.

            The need for sustenance originating in childhood poverty, the adolescent emotional need for solace and comfort, the adult desire for a larger world, another lover, a different body—all are explored by González in a series of heartbreaking and poetic vignettes.

            Each vignette is a defining moment of self-awareness, every moment an important step in a lifelong journey toward clarity, knowledge, and the nourishment that comes in various forms—even "the smallest biggest joys" help piece together a complex portrait of a gay man of color who at last defines himself by what he learns, not by what he yearns for.

Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Publishing Triangle

“Told in a series of revealing vignettes and poems, González’s Autobiography of my Hungers turns moments of need and want into revelations of truth and self-awareness, creating the portrait of an artist that is complex if not entirely complete.”—El Paso Times

“Through his provocative vignettes, González communicates a lifetime of struggle for affirmation and self-acceptance.”—Make/Shift 

Most Civil War historians now agree that the guerrilla conflict shaped the entire war in significant ways. Some of these “bushwhackers”—Nathan Bedford Forrest, William Clarke Quantrill, John Singleton Mosby—have become quite infamous. Illiterate Sam Hildebrand, one of Missouri’s most notorious guerrillas—often compared to “Rob Roy,” and the subject of dime novels—was one of the few to survive the war and have his story taken down and published. Shortly after this he was killed in a barroom brawl. “I make no apology to mankind for my acts of retaliation; I make no whining appeal to the world for sympathy. I sought revenge and I found it; the key of hell was not suffered to rust in the lock while I was on the war path.” —Sam Hildebrand Hildebrand’s reign of terror gave the Union army fits and kept much of the Trans-Mississippi, especially Missouri, roiling in the 1860s. Over seven years of fighting he and his men killed dozens of soldiers and civilians, whites and blacks; he claimed to have killed nearly one hundred himself. He was accused of many heinous acts. The historical significance of Hildebrand’s story is substantial, but his bloody tale is eminently readable and stands quite well on its own as a cold-blooded portrait of a violent time in American history. Like the nightmarish and depraved world of the Kid in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, Hildebrand’s world is truly ruthless and his story is brutally descriptive in its coolly detached rendering of one man’s personal war. Published in 1870, Hildebrand’s autobiography has long been out of print and has been a rare and highly prized acquisition among Civil War

This is the major literary achievement of a sensitive, gifted man. The author is a Yaqui Indian, a railroad gandy dancer who sees beauty in iron spikes and rail clamps as well as in twilight-purple mountains and glossy-leafed cottonwood trees. In the seventy years following his flight from the Yaqui-Mexican wars in Sonora, Savala became a talented poet and loving recorder of his people's cultural heritage. A large sampling of his original works appears in the interpretations section of this book. Together with the beautifully written autobiography, they offer a unique view of Arizona Yaqui culture and history, railroading in the American West, and the personal and artistic growth of a Native American man of letters.

First printed in 1918, Ralph Werther's Autobiography of an Androgyne charts his emerging self-understanding as a member of the "third sex" and documents his explorations of queer underworlds in turn-of-the-century New York City. Werther presents a sensational life narrative that begins with a privileged upper-class birth and a youthful realization of his difference from other boys. He concludes with a decision to undergo castration. Along the way, he recounts intimate stories of adolescent sexual encounters with adult men and women, escapades as a reckless "fairie" who trolled Brooklyn and the Bowery in search of working-class Irish and Italian immigrants, and an immersion into the subculture of male "inverts." This new edition also includes a critical introduction by Scott Herring that situates the text within the scientific, historical, literary, and social contexts of urban American life in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Tracing how this pioneering autobiography engages with conversations on immigration, gender, economics, metropolitan working-class culture, and the invention of homosexuality across class lines, this edition is ideal for courses on topics ranging from Victorian literature to modern American sexuality.

Charged by the Venetian Inquisition with the conscious and cynical feigning of holiness, Cecelia Ferrazzi (1609-1684) requested and obtained the unprecedented opportunity to defend herself through a presentation of her life story. Ferrazzi's unique inquisitorial autobiography and the transcripts of her preceding testimony, expertly transcribed and eloquently translated into English, allow us to enter an unfamiliar sector of the past and hear 'another voice'—that of a humble Venetian woman who had extraordinary experiences and exhibited exceptional courage.

Born in 1609 into an artisan family, Cecilia Ferrazzi wanted to become a nun. When her parents' death in the plague of 1630 made it financially impossible for her to enter the convent, she refused to marry and as a single laywoman set out in pursuit of holiness. Eventually she improvised a vocation: running houses of refuge for "girls in danger," young women at risk of being lured into prostitution.

Ferrazzi's frequent visions persuaded her, as well as some clerics and acquaintances among the Venetian elite, that she was on the right track. The socially valuable service she was providing enhanced this impresssion. Not everyone, however, was convinced that she was a genuine favorite of God. In 1664 she was denounced to the Inquisition.

The Inquisition convicted Ferrazzi of the pretense of sanctity. Yet her autobiographical act permits us to see in vivid detail both the opportunities and the obstacles presented to seventeenth-century women.

"Here finally are Eliade's memoirs of the first thirty years of his life in Mac Linscott Rickett's crisp and lucid English translation. They present a fascinating account of the early development of a Renaissance talent, expressed in everything from daily and periodical journalism, realistic and fantastic fiction, and general nonfiction works to distinguished contributions to the history of religions. Autobiography follows an apparently amazingly candid report of this remarkable man's progression from a mischievous street urchin and literary prodigy, through his various love affairs, a decisive and traumatic Indian sojourn, and active, brilliant participation in pre-World War II Romanian cultural life."—Seymour Cain, Religious Studies Review

"Here finally are Eliade's memoirs of the first thirty years of his life in Mac Linscott Rickett's crisp and lucid English translation. They present a fascinating account of the early development of a Renaissance talent, expressed in everything from daily and periodical journalism, realistic and fantastic fiction, and general nonfiction works to distinguished contributions to the history of religions. Autobiography follows an apparently amazingly candid report of this remarkable man's progression from a mischievous street urchin and literary prodigy, through his various love affairs, a decisive and traumatic Indian sojourn, and active, brilliant participation in pre-World War II Romanian cultural life."—Seymour Cain, Religious Studies Review