Description: This study articulates an approach to using memoirs as instruments of historical understanding. Wallach applies these principles to a body of memoirs about life in the American South during Jim Crow segregation, including works by Zora Neale Hurston, Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Alexander Percy, and Richard Wright.
Brief description: JENNIFER JENSEN WALLACH is an assistant professor of history at Georgia College and State University. She has also taught at Stonehill College.
Review Quotes:
A quietly but uncommonly ambitious work . . . Wallach's review of the theoretical literature on autobiography is refreshingly lucid and cogent. . . . I look forward to periodically rereading it and wrestling with its conclusions.
--W. Fitzhugh Brundage "Journal of American History"