The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing

The stories of lived experience offer powerful representations of a nation’s complex and often fractured identity. Personal narratives have taken many forms in American literature. From the letters and journals of the famous and the lesser known to the memoirs of former slaves to hit true crime podcasts to lyric essays to the curated archives we keep on social media, life writing has been a tool of both the influential and the disenfranchised to spark cultural and political evolution, to help define the larger identity of the nation, and to claim a sense of belonging within it. Taken together, individual stories of real American lives weave a tapestry of history, humanity, and art while raising questions about the veracity of memory and the slippery nature of truth. This volume surveys the forms of life writing that have contributed to the richness of American literature and shaped American discourse. It examines life writing as a rhetorical tool for social change and explores how technological advancement has allowed ordinary Americans to chronicle and share their lives with others.

Amy Monticello is an associate professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, MA. She is the author of the nonfiction chapbooks Close Quarters and How to Euthanize a Horse. Her essays and craft articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Brevity, Hotel Amerika, Creative Nonfiction, CALYX, under the gum tree, The Rumpus, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and elsewhere.

Jason Tucker is an instructor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, MA. His essays have appeared in The Southeast Review, River Teeth, Cream City Review, Sweet, Waccamaw, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere.