SOURCE: "Autobiography and America," in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. XLVII, No. Winter-Spring, 1971, pp. 252-77.

In the following essay, Cox describes the development of autobiographical writing in American literature—from Benjamin Franklin through Henry David Thoreau and Henry Adams to Gertrude Stein—as a reflection of American political life.

Autobiography and confessional writing are now receiving much more critical attention than they used to, and not merely because criticism has exhausted the other genres and is now moving in on a relatively virgin field. For something has happened to the whole idea of literature in the last ten years. To remember that novelists such as Truman Capote and Norman Mailer have in "In Cold Blood" and "The Armies of the Night" challenged the distinction between non-fiction and fiction; to be reminded that biography and autobiography are more marketable products than fiction; to realize that "The Autobiography of Malcolm...