SOURCE: "The Proper Study—Autobiographies in American Studies," in American Quarterly, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, 1977, pp. 241-58.

In the following essay, Sayre assesses the relevance of autobiographical writings to the discipline of American Studies.

Autobiographies, in all their bewildering number and variety, offer the student in American Studies a broader and more direct contact with American experience than any other kind of writing. For they have been written in almost every part of the country by presidents and thieves, judges and professors, Indians and immigrants (of nearly every nationality), by ex-slaves and slave owners, by men and women in practically every line of work, abolitionists to zookeepers, by adolescents and octogenarians, counterfeiters, captives, muggers, muckrakers, preachers, and everybody else. The catalogue is as great as one of Walt Whitman's own .. . or greater. It is the true Song of Myself. And Ourselves.

The bibliographies listed at the end of this...