Mary Antin occupies a central place in American prose writings on immigration and is most identified with her 1912 autobiography, The Promised Land. Written and published in the pre-World War I period of mass immigration and Americanization, the work came to represent for much of the twentieth century not just the story of a Russian Jewish immigrant girl but the experience of Americanization itself. In the wake of an ethnic revival, Houghton Mifflin republished the work in 1969 with an introduction by Oscar Handlin, and by 1985, when the Princeton University Press reprinted the volume, the original 1912 publication had gone through thirty-four printings and sold eighty-five thousand copies. In 1997 Penguin released an edition that reproduced for the first time since 1912 the eighteen black-and-white photographs from the original. In addition, excerpts from Antin's autobiography can be found in both primary- and secondary-school textbooks throughout the century. Scholars have described Antin's narrative in...