Memoir

IN 1999, THE EDITORIAL BOARD of the Modern Library compiled a list of the one hundred best English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Seven of the top twenty were memoirs or autobiographies: Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, James Watson’s The Double Helix, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the first-place winner, The Education of Henry Adams. (The other memoirs to make the top 100 were the collected autobiographical writings of W. B. Yeats; The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation, Beryl Markham’s West with the Night, Tobias Wolff ’s This Boy’s Life, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, William Styron’s Darkness Visible, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Anne Lamott ’s Operating Instructions.) Adams—great-grandson of President John Adams, grandson of President John Quincy Adams, son of Senator Charles Francis Adams, journalist, historian, novelist—embarked on the book in 1905, when he was sixty-seven. His plan was always posthumous publication—he commented to Henry James that the book would be “a shield of protection in the grave”—and it was published in 1918, shortly after Adams’s death. The following year it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, and it quickly achieved the status of American classic.

The most striking and famous thing about the book is that Adams, like Caesar and Pope Pius II before him and Gertrude Stein and Norman Mailer after, referred to himself in the third person. It was a brilliant choice, suiting both his allusive style and the bemused diffidence with which he regarded himself: someone born into an eighteenth-century world and destined to live to the twentieth; a product of almost-too-distinguished forebears whose achievements, no matter how substantial, would always be considered disappointing; a man whose lifelong search for “education” seemed always to fall short. Here he partakes in that favorite trope of autobiographers, the recollection of earliest memory:

He first found himself sitting on a yellow kitchen-floor in strong sunlight. He was three years old when he took his earliest step in education; a lesson of color. The second followed soon; a lesson of taste. On December 3, 1841, he developed scarlet fever. For several days he was as good as dead, reviving only under the careful nursing of his family. When he began to discover strength, about January 1, 1842, his hunger must have been stronger than any other pleasure or pain, for while in after life he retained not the faintest recollection of his illness, he remembered quite clearly his aunt entering the sick room bearing in her hand a saucer with a baked apple.

Two years after Adams was awarded the Pulitzer, the same prize went to another third-person autobiography with a similar title, The Americanization of Edward Bok. Bok, the Dutch-born longtime editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, explains at the outset his stylistic rationale: “I had always felt the most effective method of writing an autobiography, for the sake of a better perspective, was mentally to separate the writer from his subject by this device.” However, after reading the book, one has a hard time escaping the conclusion that Bok’s real reason was that if he had referred to himself as “I,” he would have been revealed as the insufferably smug egotist that he was. Consider the section in which he boasts about the Journal ’s circulation of a million and three-quarter copies, and imagine how it would sound with every “Bok” and “Bok’s” replaced by an “I” and “my”:

On every hand, the question was being asked: “How is it done? How is such a high circulation obtained?” Bok’s invariable answer was that he gave his readers the very best of the class of reading that he believed would interest them, and that he spared neither effort nor expense to obtain it for them. When Mr. [William Dean] Howells once asked him how he classified his audience, Bok replied, “We appeal to the intelligent American woman rather than to the intellectual type.” And he gave her the best he could obtain. As he knew her to be fond of the personal type of literature, he gave her in succession Jane Addams’s story of “My Fifteen Years at Hull House,” and the remarkable narration of Helen Keller’s “Story of My Life”; he invited Henry Van Dyke, who had never been in the Holy Land, to go there, camp out in a tent, and then write a series of sketches, “Out of Doors in the Holy Land”; he induced Lyman Abbott to tell the story of “My Fifty Years as a Minister.” He asked Gene Stratton Porter to tell of her bird-experiences in the series: “What I Have Done with Birds.” . . . He got Kate Douglas Wiggin to tell a country church experience of hers in “The Old Peabody Pew.”

I quote this passage not only to illustrate Bok’s self-regard, but because of the light it sheds on turn-of-the-twentieth-century autobiography. Bok’s high opinion of himself was to some extent justified. He shrewdly recognized that readers were interested in the life stories of prominent people (the word “celebrity” was not yet in wide circulation), told by themselves, and he went out and solicited such stories for the Ladies’ Home Journal. In many cases, they had a life beyond the magazine: all of the articles or series mentioned above eventually were turned into books. To say that the memoirs of Van Dyke (a minister and author), Abbott (another minister), Porter (a popular novelist), and Wiggin (also a novelist, notably of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm) are little read today would be perhaps to overstate their popularity. But Addams’s and Keller’s books are classics of American memoir.

Keller’s book, The Story of My Life (1902), has a strikingly modern feel for three distinct reasons. The first is her (extremely young) age at publication: just twenty-two. The second is her status as a media figure. Born in Alabama in 1880, Keller suffered an illness at the age of nineteen months that left her deaf and blind, and as a result she was also unable to speak. When she was seven, through the offices of Alexander Graham Bell, she was referred to Michael Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, who in turn assigned a young teacher named Anne Sullivan to live and work with her. Decades before Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee institutionalized the field of “public relations,” Anagnos proved to be a master at getting Keller’s name and remarkable story before the public. In 1889, she arrived at Perkins for a four-year residence. That year, an article about her appeared in The New York Times under the headline “The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl.” Between then and the appearance of her autobiography thirteen years later, Keller was featured in the Times on more than three dozen occasions, recounting the progress of her education, her visits with Bell and President Grover Cleveland, and her graduation from Perkins, where she recited thirty-six lines from Longfellow’s “Flowers,” and, the newspaper somewhat creepily reported, appeared a “a tall, noble-looking girl, finely proportioned and appearing much older than her 13 years.” Her photograph often appeared in national magazines; favorite poses showed her stroking her dog or reading Shakespeare in Braille. By May of 1900, a Times writer wondered whether “altogether too much has been written concerning Miss Helen Keller.” The next year the Times excerpted an article from Christian Endeavor World that gave a resoundingly negative answer: “Who tires of reading about Helen Keller? This wonderful girl . . . is perhaps the best-known and best-beloved young woman in all the land.”

The third modern aspect of Keller’s book is the way it prefigures—albeit with a much more uplifting finale than the ambivalent conclusion we have become used to—the multitudinous contemporary disability memoir, represented in such works as My Left Foot, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Autobiography of a Face, My Lobotomy, Poster Child, and many more. Today, the public is ready for and indeed expects such narratives; in Keller’s time, if it had not been for her fame, her story would surely have gone unpublished. Also relevant was the socially acceptable nature of her particular disability. In Louis Kaplan’s bibliography of American autobiography through 1945, the overwhelming majority of memoirists indexed under “Physically handicapped” or “Illnesses, accounts of ” suffered from one of just two conditions: blindness and tuberculosis. For an explanation, the world awaits a doctoral dissertation.

In this environment, it was all the more remarkable that A Mind That Found Itself should have appeared in the nation’s bookshops in 1908. Its author was Clifford W. Beers, who graduated from Yale in 1897 and three years later suffered a mental breakdown (subsequent writers have described it as a manic-depressive disorder, with elements of delusion) and tried to kill himself by jumping out a high window of the family home. He was committed to a series of institutions, in one of which he “found his mind” and recovered his reason, in his account, when he suddenly realized that the man claiming to be his brother, whom Beers had viewed as an imposter, was actually telling the truth. He was still subject to severe mood swings but was lucid enough to begin to be outraged at the treatment he received. In 1887, the journalist Nellie Bly had published Ten Days in a Mad-House, an undercover account of a stunt in which she feigned madness and was committed to a New York lunatic asylum. Beers doesn’t mention Bly, but he took on something of the character of an investigative reporter. At one point, he deliberately broke rules so as to be transferred to a more severe ward and experience the worst conditions the hospital had to offer. He was not disappointed: at various points he was strangled, force-fed against his wishes, secluded in a cold cell without coverings, and placed in a straitjacket for about three hundred hours.

Beers’s manic episodes were characterized by bursts of creative activity, especially writing; after his release, he took to the composition of the book with gusto. With the editorial help of a college friend, he emerged with a riveting account of his experience; as the great psychologist William James wrote in a letter to him that serves as the book’s epigraph, “It reads like fiction, but it is not fiction; and this I state emphatically, knowing how prone the uninitiated are to doubt the truthfulness of descriptions of abnormal mental processes.” The title notwithstanding, it seems that the single most important factor in Beers’s recovery was his very determination to write an account of his ordeal, and thus seek to improve conditions in such institutions and the care and treatment of the mentally ill generally. He predicted that as Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to slavery, his book would be to mental illness, and he rejected James’s advice to publish under a pseudonym: “I must fight in the open.” Beers writes in the first chapter, “I am not telling the story of my life just to write a book. I tell it because it seems my plain duty to do so. A narrow escape from death and a seemingly miraculous return to health after an apparently fatal illness are enough to make a man ask himself: For what purpose was my life spared? That question I have asked myself, and this book is, in part, an answer.”

Remarkably enough, what might have seemed delusions of grandeur proved not to be delusions at all. The year after the book’s initial publication (it was reprinted dozens of times over the next three decades), Beers founded an organization he called National Committee for Mental Hygiene (a term he coined) that eventually established branches in fifty-three countries. He was the first to propose the establishment of halfway houses, in which recovering patients could be monitored outside of a hospital setting. In an editorial published after his death in 1943, The New York Times called him “the most successful champion that the insane ever had.”¹⁷

The notion of autobiography as more a means to a social end, less an instrument of personal expression, was characteristic of the era, which is referred to as “Progressive” for a reason. Women’s rights activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1898) and Anna Howard Shaw (1915) and urban reformers Jacob Riis (1901) and Jane Addams (1910) all used their memoirs to advance the cause. The founder of the Tuskeegee Institute, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), published an autobiography in 1900 (The Story of My Life and Work) and another (Up from Slavery) in 1901. In both books, which appear to have been influenced equally by the slave narrative tradition, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, and the novels of Horatio Alger, Washington explicitly argues for the creed of hard work, self-reliance, and industrial education, while more subtly nominating himself as Frederick Douglass’s successor as the leader of American blacks.

Maybe the most striking work in this vein is Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), by Alexander Berkman, who, in protest against treatment of the Homestead Strikers in 1892, had tried to murder industrialist Henry Frick. Although the book begins with an account of his radicalization, his attack on Frick, and his trial, more than three-quarters of it is a present-tense account of his years in prison. And a remarkable account it is, gripping and unflinching and unsparing in any details, notably the sexual relations among prisoners. As Hutchins Hapgood wrote in an introduction to the original edition, “This is the only book that I know which goes deeply into the corrupting, demoralizing psychology of prison life. It shows, in picture after picture, sketch after sketch, not only the obvious brutality, stupidity, ugliness permeating the institution, but, very touching, it shows the good qualities and instincts of the human heart perverted, demoralized, helplessly struggling for life.”

Also reflective of the times’ progressive cast was a purposeful widening of the autobiographical playing field. Writing in his editor’s column in Harper’s magazine in 1909, William Dean Howells hailed works of auto biography as “the most delightful of all reading,” in large part because they constituted the “most democratic province of the republic of letters.” He asserted, “We would not restrict autobiography to any age or sex, creed, class or color,” and he called for the memoirs of “some entirely unknown person.” Actually, things were already moving in this direction. The aforementioned Hutchins Hapgood, a reform-minded American journalist, had been responsible in 1903 for a book accurately called The Autobiography of a Thief, the product of four months of interviews with a reformed miscreant identified only as Jim. The editor of the New York newspaper The Independent, the similarly named Hamilton Holt, began publishing at around the same time what he called “lifelets”: short autobiographical sketches by people from all walks of life. A selection of sixteen of them was published in 1906, under the title The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves. Included, as Holt explained in a preface, were “the story of the butcher, the sweatshop worker, the bootblack, the push-cart peddler, the lumber man, the dressmaker, the nurse girl, the cook, the cotton-picker, the head-hunter, the trained nurse, the minister, the butler and the laundryman.”

It’s not just that these people’s jobs were diverse; so were their countries of origin, which included Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Syria, China, and Japan. The United States was in the midst of the greatest immigration wave in its history. At the same time, it was poised at the beginning of what would later be termed the “American Century.” Is it any wonder that a major, maybe the major, theme of the autobiographies of the time was the meaning of being an American?

This was true even of books by Americans whose roots were very deep indeed. Perhaps the most ambivalent tale of Americanization was told by a Sioux Indian, born in Minnesota in 1858. His original name was Ohiyesa, but his father converted to Christianity, took the name Jacob Eastman, and called the boy Charles. Charles Eastman received a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and a medical degree from Boston University, and went on to a varied career that included government service and advocacy of the Native American cause. He also wrote two autobiographies, Indian Boyhood (1902) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), that, in their narrative of Eastman’s progression from his tribal childhood to full participation in American life, neatly reversed the progression of the traditional captivity narrative. But in both books he is always mindful of both the good things he experienced as a boy and the flaws of “civilization.” He concludes the second in sterling fashion by musing on the “evil and wickedness practised by the nations composed of professedly ‘Christian’ individuals”:

Behind the material and intellectual splendor of our civilization, primitive savagery and lust hold sway, undiminished, and as it seems, unheeded. When I let go of my simple instinctive nature religion, I hoped to gain something far loftier as well as more satisfying to the reason. Alas! It is also more confusing and contradictory. . . .

Yet even in deep jungles God’s own sunlight penetrates, and I stand before my own people still as an advocate of civilization. Why? First, because there is no chance for our former simple life any more; and second, because I realize that the white man’s religion is not responsible for his mistakes. . . .

I am an Indian; and while I have learned much from civilization, for which I am grateful, I have never lost my Indian sense of right and justice. I am for development and progress along social and spiritual lines, rather than those of commerce, nationalism, or material efficiency. Nevertheless, so long as I live, I am an American.

As for newcomers to the country, they could, for a time, afford to be more upbeat, and they were. Jacob Riis’s description of his arrival in New York after emigrating from Denmark communicates the general sense of almost unlimited possibility: “It was a beautiful spring morning, and as I looked over the rail at the miles of straight streets, the green heights of Brooklyn, and the stir of ferryboats and pleasure craft on the river, my hopes rose high there would be a place for me. . . . I had a pair of strong hands, and stubbornness enough to do for two; also a strong belief that in a free country, free from the dominion of custom, of caste, as well as of men, things would somehow come right in the end.” Riis arrived in New York in 1870, when the great wave of immigration was still to come. Edward Bok came from the Netherlands the same year. More than eighteen million souls journeyed to the United States between 1890 and 1920, a large proportion of them with points of origin well south of Denmark and east of Holland. The first great autobiographer who was part of that wave was Moshke Antin, born in 1881 in Polotsk, Russia. Her father immigrated to Boston in 1891; her mother and the four children followed three years later. Moshke—she would soon change her name to Mary—was placed in the first grade but within half a year was promoted to fifth. In her high school years, she got to know Edward Everett Hale and other literary and cultural figures in the city, and was encouraged to translate (from Yiddish) into English letters she’d written to her uncle describing the passage to America. She edited them into a short book that was published in 1899 with the title From Plotzk [sic] to Boston, with a foreword by the noted English Jewish writer Israel Zangwill (whose 1908 play The Melting-Pot would introduce that phrase to the popular lexicon and provide the young century’s most forceful brief in favor of immigration). The short review of Antin’s book in the Boston Transcript shows how much of a novelty her experiences still seemed: “She wrote the narrative in her native dialect called Yiddish . . . with what purpose is not known, but it evidently was written with all the fervor and enthusiasm of an exceptional girl of her age after what were to her most thrilling experiences.” By 1912, when Antin published her next book, it was no longer necessary to explain what Yiddish was. The main story of that book, The Promised Land—and there was not a molecule of irony in the title—was Antin’s life from childhood up through her teen years, but the subtext was America itself: what it meant and continued to mean to immigrants like herself, and how their presence had changed the nature of the country. Those issues are present on every page of the book, but in the introduction, Antin highlights them as part of her rationale for publishing an autobiography at the tender age of thirty. She admits that she has

not accomplished anything, I have not discovered anything, not even by accident, as Columbus discovered America. My life has been unusual, but by no means unique. And this is the very core of the matter. It is because I understand my history, in its larger outlines, to be typical of many, that I consider it worth recording. . . . I am only one of many whose fate it has been to live a page of modern history. We are the strands of the cable that binds the Old World to the New. As the ships that brought us link the shores of Europe and America, so our lives span the bitter sea of racial difference and misunderstandings. Before we came, the New World knew not the Old; but since we have begun to come, the Young World has taken the Old by the hand, and the two are learning to march side by side, seeking a common destiny.

Indeed, Antin asserts that in the process of becoming an American, her former self was obliterated: “I am just as much out of the way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell. . . . My life I have still to live; her life ended when mine began.”

The Promised Land was a smashing success, as much for its assimilationist optimism as for its undeniable literary qualities. The New York Times’s rave review concluded, “In the moving, vividly interesting pages of her autobiography, Mary Antin has presented the case of the Russian Jew’s American citizenship as it has not been presented before. And she has made a unique contribution to our modern literature and our modern history.” Publishers Weekly ranked it the best-selling nonfiction book of the year. In Antin’s lifetime (she died in 1949), The Promised Land went through thirty-four printings and sold an estimated 85,000 copies.

The Promised Land represented a high-water mark of immigrant optimism. The mid-teens saw a growth in nativist resentment against the unwashed millions. This could be seen in The Passing of the Great Race, a massive 1916 bestseller that put forth a theory of “Nordic superiority”; in the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan; and even in the success of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Not surprisingly, there was a change in mood among new Americans and those otherwise on the margins. The optimism of a Jacob Riis, a Booker T. Washington, or a Mary Antin was no longer operative. The very act of sitting down and composing an autobiography, in one’s own voice and under one’s own name, required a level of confidence that was harder to come by. Identity was becoming tenuous; the cultural ground was shifting under everyone’s feet. It was two centuries after Defoe, but the system where all books were unequivocally classified as complete truth or complete fiction was not yet in place. A series of autobiographical works by members of marginal groups explores that misty middle ground.

A book called The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was published in 1912. It told the story of a light-skinned black man, never named in the text, who, after witnessing a lynching, decides that for the rest of his life he will pass as white. No author was listed on the title page. Nor was there any indication that the book was not a factual autobiography. In reality it was a novel by an African-American lawyer, songwriter, and diplomat named James Weldon Johnson, who had decided on this course of publication, he wrote to a friend, because if “the author is known, and known to be the one who could not be the main character, the book will fall flat.” Reviewers and the public fell for the ruse as well. In his actual autobiography, Along This Way—published in 1933, after he had gained prominence as an activist and NAACP officer—Johnson described “being introduced to and talking with one man who tacitly admitted to those present that he was the author of the book.”

First-person texts by Jewish immigrants came from a wide range of stances, few of them unambiguous. As in Defoe’s time, it was often difficult or impossible to tell whether a printed testimony was the work of the “I” of the text or a masked fabricator. Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, an admittedly fictional autobiography, was published in 1917. The very first paragraph showed a marked contrast with Antin: to the narrator, Levinsky, the kind of transformation she talked about, the magical casting of an old self in the new world, wasn’t really possible: “I was born and reared in the lowest depths of poverty and I arrived in America—in 1885—with four cents in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a look at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago.”

Published in 1923 with a cloudier provenance was Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl: The Making of a Professional Jew. There was no name on the title page, and the publisher stated it was the “anonymous autobiography” of a judge who had died five years previously and who gives himself the name “Meyer Hirsch.” This time, reviewers were divided on the actuality question. The New York Times hedged its bets, allowing that it is “probably about one-half fiction.” The real percentage was one hundred: the author, Samuel Ornitz, made up the story of Hirsch, a thoroughly corrupt figure, who boasts about being a “professional Jew,” someone who exploits and sometimes invents threats of anti-Semitism to advance his own interests or, as a character in the book puts it, stirs up “rumpuses, alarms, furors over every fancied grievance, insult and reflection.” Ornitz was in fact a Jew, but the book played into the hands of those who felt that the newcomers were less than 100 percent American. (Ornitz went to Hollywood in the late 1920s and was a successful screenwriter until 1947, when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Along with other members of the “Hollywood Ten,” he refused to testify, and served nine months in prison.)

In October 1916, Edward Bok published in his Ladies’ Home Journal an anonymous article called “My Mother and I: The Story of How I Became an American Woman.” It was accompanied by an appreciation from the pen of none other than former president Theodore Roosevelt, a friend of Bok’s, who called the piece “a really noteworthy story—a profoundly touching story—of the Americanizing of a young girl, who between babyhood and young womanhood leaps over a space which in all cultural and humanizing essentials is far more important than the distance painfully traversed by her fore-fathers during the preceding thousand years.” The following year the article was expanded into a book called My Mother and I, now with an author’s name on the title page: E. G. Stern. The narrative touches many of the same notes as The Promised Land, but underpinning them were ambivalent chords. The narrator, who never refers to herself by name, came from the old country as a baby but, she tells us in the opening chapter, has shaken off every remnant of the ghetto in which she grew up: “I am a college woman. My husband is engaged in an honor-able profession. Our home is unpretentious but pretty, and is situated in a charming old suburb of an American city where attractive modern residences stand by the side of stately old colonial houses, as if typifying young America in the shadow of old America.” At the end of the book, her mother comes to visit that home for the first time and is baffled: by the English her grandson speaks, by the non-kosher food her daughter serves (“Her plate at meals was left almost untouched”), by the “white kitchen, used only for cooking.” And then the narrator realizes that the price of her journey and her happiness is an irreparable break with her heritage.

Neither the front matter nor the text offered any clue as to whether E. G. Stern, who was a Philadelphia journalist and former social worker named Elizabeth Gertrude Stern, was telling her own story or a made-up one. The publisher called the book autobiography, but reviewers again were divided. The New York Times commented that the story was “told vividly and with so great an effect that one is often impelled to wonder whether this is not, in essentials at least, a genuine autobiography rather than a work of fiction.” That anonymous critic was perceptive. The book was in essence Stern’s own story of growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as the daughter of Aaron Kleine Levin, a cantor, and his wife, Sarah.

Stern’s next book, I Am a Woman—and a Jew, was published in 1927 under the name Leah Morton. Again, it was officially an autobiography, and again reviewers were puzzled. The Times said it “purports and appears to be . . . the actual experiences of a real woman” but didn’t take a stand on whether it was. The Boston Transcript assumed the book contained “Morton’s” own story, but felt that it also constituted “virtually a composite autobiography of the Jew in America.” The truth was complicated. As late as 1986, in the introduction to a new edition of the book, the scholar Ellen Umansky described the main outlines of the story as factual, with some embellishments and alterations. However, shortly after the edition appeared, Umansky received a letter from Stern’s older son, Thomas Noel Stern, a retired history professor, in which he asserted (Umansky later wrote) that “Elizabeth Stern was not born in East Prussia to Sarah and Aaron Levin as she publicly claimed throughout her life, but rather was born in 1889 in Pittsburgh, the illegitimate daughter of Christian Limburg, a German Lutheran, and Elizabeth Morgan, a Welsh Baptist. ‘After shifting from home to home in early years,’ he wrote, ‘Mother was placed with Aaron and Sara Leah Levin, near the Pittsburgh railway depot.’ ” In a memoir of his own published in 1988, Secret Family, Thomas Stern made additional revelations, most scandalously that Aaron Levin had sexually abused his mother from the age of seven to fourteen, when she became pregnant and underwent an illegal abortion. Umansky set about investigating these claims and was unable to find any records of Elizabeth Stern’s birth, possibly because, “according to Thomas Stern, his mother deliberately destroyed all records alluding to her true identity.” She concluded, “It may well be impossible, then, to establish with certainty the true circumstances surrounding Elizabeth Stern’s birth.” But there is little doubt that Stern—who gave herself the middle name Gertrude, and who was also known as Bessie Levin (the name under which she was listed in Aaron Levin’s will), E. G. Stern, Leah Morton, and Eleanor Morton (the name under which she published most of her other books, and by which her 1954 New York Times obituary identified her)—was the classic case of an early-twentieth-century American who used autobiographical forms to address her own deep questions of identity.

It also seems clear that Stern only partially believed the stories she told in her books. You could not say the same for the man who called himself Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and whose 1928 autobiography, Long Lance, was praised in the New York Herald Tribune by the anthropologist Paul Radin as “an unusually faithful account” of the author’s youth among the Plains Indians. The book included a preface by the novelist Irvin S. Cobb, stating, “I claim there is authentic history in these pages and verity and most of all a power to describe in English words the thoughts, the instincts, the events which originally were framed in a native language.” As the historian Donald B. Smith revealed in his 1982 book Chief Buffalo Long Lance: The True Story of an Imposter, Long Lance’s native language was actually English. He had been born in North Carolina as Sylvester Long, the son of former slaves, with some black, white, and Native American blood. In 1903, at age thirteen, he ran away from home to join a Wild West show, where he presented himself as an Indian and performed as such. Six years later he exaggerated his Cherokee blood to successfully apply to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, under the name Sylvester Long Lance, and he graduated in the same class as the great athlete Jim Thorpe. He went on to college in New York and fought in World War I for the Canadian forces. After his discharge, he worked as a journalist in Calgary and Winnipeg, where he took the final step in his representational journey by adopting the name Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and the identity of a full-blooded Blackfoot.

In New York in 1925 on a lecture tour, Long Lance met Ray Long, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, who commissioned him to write an autobiographical article. Long Lance gave himself a boyhood among the Blackfoot, a stint working on western cattle ranches, and some time with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (much more renowned than the show he actually had toured with), then picked up his true story at Carlisle. The article was so well received that Long, also an editor with William Ran dolph Hearst’s book publishing operation, commissioned him to expand it into a full-blown autobiography, which he did. The result was a combination of research, stories Long Lance borrowed from Blackfoot friends’ childhoods, and pure fancy. The opening line was “The first thing in my life that I can remember is the exciting aftermath of an Indian fight in northern Montana,” and Long Lance went on to tell of buffalo hunts on the plains (never mind that the last buffalo hunt had taken place long before his birth). The combination of retroactive nostalgia for the vanished Native American past, on the one hand, and Long Lance’s undeniable skill as a writer and poseur, on the other, was such that not a single murmur of doubt was heard. The first edition of the book was sold out; it was followed by an English edition and Dutch and German translations. Long Lance became a celebrity and a fixture on the social circuit; the syndicated columnist O. O. McIntyre, who informed the country at large about Gotham doings, called him “an amazing paradox, a vanishing Red Man with an Oxonian accent, spats and a monocle.” So successful was his mingling that a 1930 New York Herald Tribune article titled “One Hundred Percent American” commented, with unintended irony, “There is romance always in the man who can play the game and live the life of another race.” That same year, a Hollywood producer hired Long Lance to appear in a film called The Silent Enemy, an anthropological docudrama, in the vein of Nanook of the North, about the life of the Indians of northern Canada before the arrival of the Europeans. He got rave reviews, including one from Variety that noted: “Chief Long Lance is an ideal picture Indian, because he is a full-blooded one.” But the film was the beginning of the end of Long Lance’s trail. His costar, Chief Chauncey Yellow Robe, was an actual Native American, a grandnephew of Sitting Bull. He expressed doubts about Long Lance’s professed identity to the film’s producers, who discovered the truth, and confronted Long Lance with it. They never went public, for a revelation of Long Lance’s fakery would destroy The Silent Enemy’s claims of authenticity. But Long Lance knew that before long he would be exposed. In 1931, he fatally shot himself in the head. He did not leave a note.

The late 1920s were the golden age of autobiographical hoaxes. Postwar and pre-crash, possibility and ballyhoo were in the air, and imagination ran wild. One day in 1925, an elderly peddler named Alfred Aloysius Smith came to the door of Ethelreda Lewis, an English novelist living in South Africa. He got to talking and told her, among other things, that, when living in Utah, he had helped quell an uprising of the Ute Indians; that he had been a London newspaper reporter and a Scotland Yard detective; and that in Africa he had been a big-game hunter, an explorer, and a miner and had once saved Cecil Rhodes from an alligator attack. Mrs. Lewis persuaded him to collaborate with her on his autobiography. A year later it was published in England and was chosen in America as the first selection of the Literary Guild. A trade edition was put out by the three-year-old publishing firm Simon & Schuster, which had made its reputation and a great deal of money with a series of crossword-puzzle books but had yet to have any success with a book of the conventional sort, under the title Trader Horn; being the life and works of Alfred Aloysius Horn: an “old visiter” . . . the works written by himself at the age of seventy-three and the life, with such of his philosophy as is the gift of age and experience, taken down and here edited by Ethelreda Lewis. Perhaps the book’s self-consciously eighteenth-centuryish title was a hint that the accuracy of its contents was not absolute. Some critics were skeptical; the Times Literary Supplement commented that the author’s “unaffected simplicity is at times indistinguishable from the diabolical guile of those who are experts in the fashions of the American book market. Nevertheless, a miracle may have happened, it is true; it is not that we cynically doubt the possibility of miracles. Mr. Horn seems to us to be rather too good, at times.” A recent writer, Tim Couzens, spent years checking out Smith’s tales and concluded, in his 1992 book Tramp Royal, that many of them happened roughly as Smith recounted them. The public, which bought 170,000 copies of the book, didn’t seem to much care. Publishers Weekly assigned it to the nonfiction bestseller list, where for the years 1927 and 1928 it was in fourth place and third, respectively. Aiding in the sales effort was Simon & Schuster’s decision to bring Smith, now universally known as “Trader Horn,” to New York City for a publicity lap. Like Long Lance the following year, he traveled the social circuit and was interviewed by many reporters, including E. B. White of The New Yorker, who wrote:

The old man’s childish simplicity in the midst of exploitation was lovely. Nobody quite like him ever visited these shores—a fabulous man, only half real, a sort of ancient mariner. We met him at the Literary Guild’s birthday party. He was wedged in between Zona Gale and Elinor Wylie,¹⁸ cameras clicking, caterers catering, book circulation mounting; but withal he was rather enjoying it, his long life among cannibals and animals having fitted him to withstand booksy folk and cameramen. He enjoys being picturesque, and does it without offense.

Smith issued two further volumes of autobiography before his death in 1931. That year MGM released Trader Horn, recounting selected adventures, starring Harry Carey in the title role. The film included some classic dialogue, as when Horn’s sidekick, Peru, asks, “There are cannibals?” and he replies: “Aye. A God-fearing race they are. Except, as you say, in the matter of diet.” The movie was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, but lost to Cimarron.

Trader Horn came right in the middle of a wave of first-person travel/ adventure memoirs. One or more books by T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Peter Fleming, Richard Halliburton, Negley Farson, and Richard E. Byrd all appeared on Publishers Weekly’s list of top ten bestselling books of the year. One of the first in the genre, and perhaps the most successful, was Frederick O’Brien’s 1920 White Shadows in the South Seas. Seeing its success—forty-four weeks on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list in 1920 and 1921—George Putnam, the young heir to the venerable publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons, who had recently taken the reins of the firm, asked a friend of his named George S. Chappell to write a South Seas burlesque. This came out under the title The Cruise of the Kawa, credited to Walter E. Traprock, F.R.S.S.E.U. (Fellow, Royal South Seas Explorers Union), and included staged photos of such Manhattan notables as Heywood Broun, Frank Crowninshield, Rockwell Kent, and Ralph Barton. It sold close to 100,000 copies and was followed by two sequels, My Northern Exposure and Sarah of the Sahara.

Like George Putnam, but maybe even more so, Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster, the founders and proprietors of Simon & Schuster, were known for aggressively marketing their books and authors—a marked contrast to the traditionally genteel business ethos of American publishers at the time. So it wasn’t surprising that they would have seen the potential in Joan Lowell, a minor movie actress who had given lectures on her nautical experiences and who came to their offices one day early in 1929. Geoffrey Hellman, in a 1939 New Yorker profile of the firm, recounted that “Schuster was impressed by Miss Lowell, a well-built girl with dark, flashing eyes and powerful biceps.” He brought her in to see his partner,

who was even more impressed. They got her to work up her reminiscences into a book-length account of her first seventeen years, in which she stated, among other things, that her father was the Australian-born son of a Mon tenegrin landowner and had for seventeen years been owner and captain of the four-masted schooner Minnie A. Caine; that her mother, whose surname she had taken, was a member of the Lowell family of Boston; that from the age of eleven months to seventeen years she had been the only female on board the Minnie A. Caine; that she had seen her father break up a waterspout half a mile away by shooting it with a rifle; that she had watched nine virgins and their bridegrooms consummate their marriage in a rather public wedding ceremony on one of the South Sea Islands; that finally the Minnie A. Caine, sailing for Australia with 900 tons of copra, had burned and sunk, and she had to swim over a mile against a high-running sea to a lightship, carrying a kitten on each shoulder; and that she could spit a curve in the wind.

Simon & Schuster worked their marketing magic, and Lowell briefly seized the national publicity spotlight. One article, syndicated by the Newspaper Enterprise Association in papers across the country, started this way:

Gangway for Skipper Joan!

Gangway for the 26-year-old girl who has licked the world!

Her name is Joan Lowell. She is sort of a “Trader Horn in petticoats” and her life story is the most alluring you ever read. Here is a real story of the South Seas, more fascinating even than the fiction tales of Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Cradle of the Deep was selected by the Literary Guild’s main competitor, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and got some strong reviews. The New York Times said, “It’s a jolly yarn, mates; told with dash and ardor and employing a vocabulary as replete with expletives as one will encounter at sea or in a highly modern Broadway show.” The book shot up to the number-one spot on nonfiction bestseller lists, and eventually was purchased by some 107,000 souls. However, early doubts were raised as well. A review in the New York Herald Tribune by Lincoln Colcord, a writer with excellent credentials in the maritime field (according to a biographical reference work, he “was born at sea off Cape Horn in the bark Charlotte A. Littlefield, commanded by his father, Captain Lincoln Alden Colcord of Searsport, Maine. His family had been seafarers for five generations”), said the book was “such a good yarn that one wishes it had been presented frankly as a work of fiction, so that the question of its nautical authenticity had never arisen. . . . Space does not permit the cataloging of all the genuine nautical errors in the book. . . . Their sum total is rather staggering.” Soon afterward, residents of Berkeley, California, told the San Francisco Chronicle that Lowell, whose real name was Helen Joan Wagner, had spent most of her childhood as a neighbor of theirs. Then the Minnie A. Caine was spotted shipshape, anchored in Oakland Harbor, California. It emerged that Lowell and her father had been aboard the boat, but only for a total of fifteen months. The Book-of-the-Month Club offered its 65,000 subscribers refunds on the book, and Simon & Schuster issued a statement acknowledging that the book had “a considerably larger element of romanticized fact interwoven with the underlying sequence of truthful narrative than we had at first realized.” However, the firm pronounced itself “still satisfied that the essential honesty of Joan’s yarn remains unassailable.”

The humorist Will Rogers, in his syndicated column, had some sport with the scandal. He said he had been looking forward to reading Cradle of the Deep: “Never mind all this Fiction, I want some facts, and all the things I had read about this book said here is the real McCoy.” He enjoyed the book, he wrote, though he was “a little leary right from the start as to how a Mother could part with a seven month old Baby Girl, but not knowing sea people much I thought well maby they part with their young young.” It was an “awful blow” when it turned out that “most of Joan’s Deep Seaing was on the Ferry from an Apartment in Jersey City over to her Publishers. And that profanity was all gathered from two trips to the ‘Front Page.’ ”¹⁹

The Bookman conducted a debate in its pages: “Are Literary Hoaxes Harmful?” To an early-twenty-first-century reader, the arguments ring eerily familiar. Taking the affirmative side was Lincoln Colcord, who was less shocked by Lowell’s fabrications than the lack of shock (and continued strong sales) with which they had been greeted: “If charlatanism is to be more successful than honest writing, and win its way through advertising and publicity on which there is no check, the foundations of literary effort are seriously threatened.” Arguing the negative was the columnist Heywood Broun, who invoked the principle of the Higher Truth:

Ancients admitted the difficulty of drawing hairlines between the false and true and this feat has hardly grown more simple in the Age of the Unconscious. If I record with factual accuracy some series of events which happened to me I have arrived at a truth of sorts. But it is not the only sort of truth. Suppose I color and heighten and even fabricate episodes more exciting, I am still not beyond all contact with the truth, for in this case I am drawing material out of visions and deepest longings.

Writing in The New Yorker, E. B. White was less inclined to be indulgent than he had been in the Trader Horn affair. Noting that Broun had defended Lowell by referring to “a fundamental verity in fairy tales,” White commented: “All of this gives us what can briefly be described as a pain. The old balderdash pain.”