SOURCE: “Jefferson's Autobiography: Recovering Literature's Lost Ground,” in The Southern Review, Vol. XIV, No. 4, October, 1978, pp. 633-52.

In the following essay, Cox assesses the literary value of Jefferson's Autobiography, claiming that it represents an early American example of the under-examined memoir genre. Cox also delves into the influence and interplay between Jefferson's work and the more famous Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

My text is the Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson. It is hardly fair to contend that devoting attention to it is to recover lost ground for literature since there is scarcely any evidence that Jefferson's account of his life was ever held as literary ground. Literary critics and scholars of course ignore it. Historians and biographers accord it little more than perfunctory glances. The historian almost fatally sees the subjective element in all autobiography since he is perforce wearing his objective historical lenses; and the biographer has, in...