Spokesmen

The books of the most influential and characteristic American writers do not easily fit into the categories that determine "courses" in academic departments. The writings of the great Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin, Thoreau, and Henry Adams, of the former slave Frederick Douglass, of the architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, of those literary mavericks Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, and Norman Mailer: these are not readily classified as "prose fiction," "poetry," or even "history" or "philosophy." Yet to be ignorant of these writers is to be unaware of the special quality of American history, thought, and letters.

Thomas Couser, currently teaching English at Connecticut College, persuasively argues that most of the above-named writers both share in and contribute to a unique American literary form which he calls "prophetic autobiography." The author working in this mode, Couser argues, conflates his personal and communal lives, and "like the Old Testament prophet," interprets the history of himself and his community in the light of God's Will. He thus functions "as a representative of his community — as a reformer of its ethos, articulator of its highest ideals, interpreter of its history, and activist in the service of its best interests."

The Puritan autobiographers, as well as Douglass, Thoreau, Whitman, Adams, and 'three contemporary writers — Malcolm X, Mailer, and Robert Pirsig — group nicely under Couser's definition of the prophetic mode. Each appropriates thematic and formal matter from his predecessors and then contributes similar although modified materials to his successors. It is this continuity of change within a relative constancy of form and theme that Couser rightly perceives as a tradition in American writing.

However, the tradition (and Couser's scholarly honesty) can accommodate significant variations. Franklin's Autobiography, for example, widely known today by virtue of its being assigned reading in high school "American Studies" classes, is one of several books which Couser considers as having only a tenuous or limited relationship to the prophetic mode.

Instead of presenting himself as an interpreter or reformer of his time and society, Franklin — especially toward the conclusion of his book — functions not so much as a prophet but as an embodiment of the post-Revolutionary American. The narrative character Franklin created for himself thus appears less the exalted visionary and more the exemplary citizen of his time. Therefore, writes Couser, when Franklin "had become literally the representative of the community, his self was, after a fashion, annihilated.... Franklin simply 'died' into history."

Couser's analyses of the other autobiographies included in his study are genuinely bold, perceptive, and illuminating. His scholarship is sound and comprehensive, yet displayed with grace and style. Indeed, the book is written with admirable clarity and elegant wit and is recommended highly both to professional scholars and to those who have an amateur interest in American life and letters.

AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY:The Prophetic Modeby G. Thomas Couser '68University of Massachusetts, 1979222 pp. $15

Professor Epperson has been a member of theEnglish Department at Dartmouth since 1964.His most recent book, The King Lear Experience, was written in collaboration withGobin Stair '33.