The first decade of the twentieth century introduced new voices into African American autobiography. The memoirs published as monographs enabled no assumptions about scope or content, or about literary aspirations or political agendas. Readers and publishers alike were introduced to a broad array of life writings prompted by many impulses. Booker T. Washington published two different works in 1901. An Autobiography: The Story of My Life and Work ran 455 pages and included 59 black and white images. Up from Slavery, Washington's shorter slave narrative, ran only 330 pages. Inspiring accounts of African American community engagement and collective aspirations, significantly more modest than Washington’s, were published that same year.The early twentieth century turn to the collective biography was a powerful rejection of self-made man mythologies long shaping white American autobiographical conventions. Life writing for and about the masses became a priority for magazine editor Pauline Hopkins and, by extension, for the Colored American Magazine. As her career revealed, Hopkins was dedicated to producing writing — including autobiography — that recuperated families and communities.

In her chapter, Thomas reads pre-1800 legal writings about people of African descent as Black life writing. She expands autobiographical writing beyond an account of an individual’s growth and development in cases of people of African descent to narratives regarding Black people as active agents forming an embodied community racialized and marginalized by the dominant culture. Thomas argues that Black writers published autobiographical writings and also wove personal narratives into legal documents from fidavits to freedom petitions, as well as into traditional literary forms such as poems and letters. However, during the same colonial and early American eras, people of European descent inscribed details about Black peoples in a variety of historical records such as the census, bills of sale, antislavery pamphlets, court records, and runaway slave advertisements to accentuate their differences from and inability to assimilate into the majority culture.

Williams’s chapter argues that there is more to learn about the compositional process for late nineteenth-century black autobiographies. Williams asks, how, where, and under what terms did African American autobiographers — most of whom did not consider themselves professional writers — draft, arrange, and revise their texts? She turns to periodicals, which played an important role in the market for producing autobiographical texts, and locates the Indianapolis Freeman as one paper that exemplifies the three functions of publishing, marketing, and evaluating African American life writing. For nearly a year in 1894 and 1895, Freeman owner George Knox serially published his autobiography “My Life as I Remember It — As a Slave and Freeman” in the newspaper’s pages.