SOURCE: "The (Hi)story of Their Lives: Mythic Autobiography and 'The Lost Generation'," in Journal of American Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, April, 1993, pp. 35-56.

In the following essay, Dolan discusses the influence of autobiographical writings—particularly Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return (1934), Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (1964), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up (1945)—in establishing popular views of American expatriate writers in Paris during the 1920s.

Of what use is autobiography to history? At first glance, autobiographies would seem invaluable to historians. After all, no attempt to reconstruct or understand the past would seem complete without a sprinkling of quotations from some form of "eyewitness account." Among the various forms of such accounts available to historians, the formal autobiography often provides the most comprehensive and comprehensible account extant of the personal experience of historical events.¹ Yet even so strong an admirer of the genre as Allan Nevins was forced to admit...