Introduction

Introduction

Description

It is a familiar idea that modernity allows the ordinary citizen to make a national identity central to an individual identity: being-American has been central to the self-definitions of many Americans of all races and classes, as being-English (and, later, British) was to so many Englishmen and -women. For these patriots, the story of the nation was a crucial element in their sense of themselves. It is a slightly less familiar thought that the identity of this nation is tied up with the stories of individuals—Representative Men and women, in Emerson's formula—whose stories, in helping to fashion a national narrative, serve also, indirectly, to shape the individual narratives of other patriotic—nationally identified—citizens. Horatio Alger famously contributed to the development of a narrative of success, constructing an American pattern that many—from Booker T. Washington to Henry Ford—read into their own life-stories; fitting this pattern was, for them, as for those who celebrated them, a crucial element of their American-ness, a necessary part of what made them suitable objects of the identifications of their fellow citizens.

Source Publication

The Seductions of Biography

Source Editors/Authors

Mary Rhiel, David Suchoff

Publication Date

1996

Introduction

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