Modern American Memoirs: 1917-1992 – An Anthology of Beautifully Written Excerpts from 35 Quintessential Lives

by Annie Dillard (Editor), Cort Conley

"[In] this anthology of well-chosen excerpts by a satisfyingly diverse group of writers....the truth of their lives shines from every beautifully, often courageously composed page." —  Booklist “Packed with superb writing.”  —  New York Newsday Modern American Memoirs  is a sampling from 35 quintessential 20th century memoirs, including contributions from Margaret Mead, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong Kingston, Loren Eisely, and Zora Neale Hurston. Supremely written and excellent examples of the art of biography, these excerpts present a beautifully wide range of American life.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Essays, Writing, Anthologies, Biography, Biography Memoir

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945) is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Francisco · Rating 5 out of 5]

A memoir is, unlike an autobiography, a memory of a specific event. Some authors see their whole life as a single event or as a series of events and so title their autobiography a memoir or call the story of their life: "their memoirs". But a good memoir is like a novel or better yet, a short story - it is focused and it tells a story worth reading, among other things, for the way it's told. I've always been fascinated by memoirs, especially the bad ones. Why are some memoirs bad? What makes them bad? In the bad memoirs there is, not surprisingly, a certain lack of craft that comes off as egotism. As if the only thing that mattered to the author was getting the damn thing off his or her chest and out into the world because, well, that kind of unburdening is good therapy. Even in the memoirs that describe the terrible tragedy that befell the author, there is a certain "look at how much I suffered" or "look at what I accomplished despite my hardship" that stinks of ego. In good memoirs, like the samples in this book, you get the sense that the author is more concerned about you, the reader, than he is about himself. In a good memoir, the author gives you not only language beautifully crafted but also awakens you to greater understanding, deeper consciousness. The author has found a way to transform something personal and specific into something you the reader have also felt or intimated but never found the words for it. In a good memoir, more than in any other genre, there is a potential for two souls to meet. This is a collection of memoirs selected by wonderful writers with sensitive taste. They are memoirs of people who are interesting and thoughtful and funny. These are memoirs by people who went on to write great books or do significant things and so in many cases what you have is the story of how a vocation was discovered, of the call to be and to do that was heard and answered. So be prepared, if you read this book, to feel that you too have a purpose and a path which must be maintained, if you are on it, or found if you are not.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of all the essays in Annie Dillard’s and Cort Conley’s Modern American Memoirs, the one I think I learned the most from was the excerpt from Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow. His original comparisons! “I watched the sky with suspicion,” he writes. “Exposed as we were, it could jump on us like a leopard from a tree” (Stegner, 27). Or, “[The wind:] hits the Plains and comes across Alberta and Saskatchewan like the breath of a blowtorch” (Stegner, 34). Throughout the essay, Stegner compares flora and fauna and man and machine in fresh ways that help me understand his sensory and psychological situation.

He’s an expert at rhythm. It might be the rolling polysyndeton in a gust of wind: “Before the shack was finished we lived in a tent, which the night wind constantly threatened to blow away, flapping the canvas and straining the ropes and pulling the pegs from the gravelly ground” (Stegner, 26). Or it might be the intentionally angular assonance and clunky consonance of a jalopy, a “high, square car, with its yellow spoke wheels and its brass bracing rods from windshield to mudguards and its four-eared brass radiator cap” (Stegner 25). Hear it? Brass and bracing. They sound the same. Or maybe they all end with “d”: Rod, wind, shield, mud, guard, eared. Or the rambling two-beat cadence of windshield and mudguard contrasted with a series of triplets: “high square car,” “yellow spoke wheels,” and “brass bracing rod.” Alternating cadences, Stegner makes me feel like I am in the car, a square on wheels, the floor vibrating from the various ruts and dents in the rough roads and green trails of Stegner’s childhood. The sound of the sentence complements its meaning well.

It’s rural life made beautiful but not sentimental. Frederick Buechner, in an excerpt from The Sacred Journey, does much the same. By my count, this one sentence evokes at least three senses: “Then back to the big shingled summer house by the canal, where ducks quacked for breadcrumbs and bees buzzed among the honeysuckle, and all through the house there were bowls of flowers – black-eyed Susans, wild roses, cat-tails – and cold crab in the ice box, cold beer, and lemonade in crockery pitchers, a mocha torte with ground almonds in it that took two days to make” (Buechner, 82). There’s sight, sound, and taste, and the specificity in the final phrase about the mocha torte keeps the other phrases rooted in originality. Detail is the enemy of cliché, and the crushed almonds in the torte steer the cold beer and the jug of lemonade away from what I was expecting next: Mama fanning herself on the front porch. Other images in the essay feel suspended in space, freed from time, composite moments, lightning flashes of memory that haunt Buechner. Though the piece is retrospective and generally past tense – “I had touched.. The curtain would rise… Not a word was spoken… She had dreamed… She would never have said…” (Buechner, 83) – some of those composites are simple present: “I remember my Grandmother… She sits… She talks… (Buechner, 81). These transitions between tense feel organic; I picked up on them because I’ve been focusing on tense in my writing and I’m interested in how writers shift tense within pieces. As far as I can tell, the only rule about tense is that there’s no rule. The needs of a story dictate where appropriate, organic, and revelatory shifts in tense should occur.

Other favorite take-away lessons from the collection:
I love how Russell Baker alternates between general description and specific anecdote. General: “Days when there were no news sensations the newsboys lived by their wits…” Specific: “She shouted at the newsboy speeding off up the street…” General: “My transition to city life was a series of agonies…” Specific: “On my first day in Newark…” (Baker, 52, 53). I like how Richard Selzer writes about river life using subtle river language. Describing a dead body: “Who could imagine that currents of warm air had ever coursed among those fingers, streamed across those translucent webs?” (Selzer, 107). I appreciate Chris Offutt’s surrealistic depiction of circus life, ascending the hierarchy of jobs from stake puller to walrus impersonator. He celebrates fringe culture – a monkey acts like a human on one page, a boy acts like a walrus on the next – in ways that remind me of Hank Stuever’s Off-Ramp and Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar. Finally, I love, love, love this quote by James McConkey, from “Court of Memory”: “Memory simplifies, for its impulse is order; in playing upon a given relationship, it can erode the irrelevant and ambiguous to leave the bones of allegory” (McConkey, 349). What a perfect reminder that creative non-fiction writers get the best of both worlds: We shed irrelevant and impertinent details to work with the “bones” of an ordered story, but we also work intentionally to acknowledge and commemorate each story’s inherent complexity.

[Brierly]

Of all the anthologies from my nonfiction class, this one was my least favorite. Yes, I gave it three stars, and I'd probably say 3.5 because of James Baldwin. All the stars to Baldwin--if you haven't read him, you should!

"Modern" is certainly a relative term as almost all of these entires included an anecdote about the Sears catalog. Some of the stories were compelling, but many felt as though they (the authors) were repeating the same tired dance. Memory-reflection-memory-reflection. I like more experimental nonfiction.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly surprising and useful book. It occupies the middle age of the memoir--the thirty or so years (although there are exceptions) between the 19th century Great Men Writing About Their Great Lives memoir and the Fucked Up Childhood memoir. Most of these deal in experiences--this is what is was like to be a kid on a farm in Iowa in 1870, a foot soldier in the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi, a worker at a circus, and so on. Very nicely done, and fills a needed gap in my education.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's an interesting book to teach, lots to work with. bummer that everything is a selection from a larger work-- it is hard to show students how to write short memoir pieces from this model, but many have said they want to get the larger works to continue the stories. many classics in the collection.

[Justin Barbaree · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great collection of mostly excerpts from larger memoirs, featuring a variety of voices from the 20th century. I used the book in a writing class to introduce the different approaches, styles, and themes that come up in memoir. My favorites in the collection are Richard Wright, Loren Eiseley, Tobias Wolff, Frederick Buechner, Anne Moody, Kate Simon, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Barry Lopez, although there are probably several others that I am forgetting. The strengths of this collection are its variety: we get the immigrant experience, minority voices, musicians, farmers, coming of age tales, from many walks of life. With Annie Dillard and Cort Conley as editors, there are also plenty of American west and nature writings in the collection as well. The downside of the collection is that the stories are all partial; we're missing the context of the larger narratives in which they fit in and add to. But they are great snapshots nonetheless, and I have put not a few on my list to read in their entirety.

[Kevin Hodgson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deep literary dive into the memoir genre ...

[Ericka Jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has several snippets from a variety of American authors. I only read one and that was from The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. I found this book at my local library as my book club is reading The Warrior Woman and I couldn’t find a copy. I suppose, in this case, the memoirs pull out probably the most interesting or entertaining part of the original - I don’t know. I don’t find Kingston’s snippet particularly interesting or entertaining.

[Angie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection of memoirs whose stories concentrate around the time frame between the Great Depression and the civil rights movement.

With multiple takes on ideas like the intrigue of the circus, the bitterness of racism, and the hard work of conquering the west, this collection showed this time period of America from a different angle of authentic voices.

On the down side, some of the excerpts just weren't for me (in which case, I admit to just skipping forward to the next one), and several others felt like they ended too soon or didn't have enough background. And, where were the ladies? Their voice was underrepresented.

That said, the collection exposed new-to-me writers I really liked, and Annie Dillard includes a long list in the back for additional memoirs she recommends that didn't fit the time frame or American writer requirements for this collection.

I plan on reading more from these writers, whose excerpts represent my favorites of the collection:

Frank Conroy
Harry Middleton
Richard Wright
Ralph Ellison
Malcolm X
Walace Stenger
Russell Baker
Maureen Howard
Cynthia Ozick
Hamlin Garland
Chris Offutt
James McConkey
William Kittredge
Margaret Mead

All in all, definitely worth a read.

[Conor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had previously reviewed this with "Assigned reading for a class from 10 years ago - finally finished" without explaining why it was worth going back. I am not, as a rule, a fan of memoirs as a genre. The great bulk of them (by my estimation) are insipid, full of attempts to alter history, and generally written for a pile of cash, or to fling some final barbs.

Either way, these are not whatever I find objectionable about most memoirs. In fact, some of them are gorgeous and haunting.

I might say that I should have read this book in class when it was assigned by my creepy, ancient, grammar teacher. Oddly enough, since this was her choice, sandwiched among much lower quality material that satisfied state requirements...I'd much rather say that I understand why she chose these as something worth reading; because it show exactly what how much the memoir can do as a genre; a something that I would not, or could not, understand as an 11th grade student.

[Christin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The anthology provides a wide array of memoirs and is really a standard for teaching the genre. It holds a dear place in my heart because in my memoir class with Karl, I unwittingly mentioned in conference on the day we read Maureen Howard's piece from Facts of Life that I had performed in my high school's production of The Music Man as a pick-a-little lady and knew the classical attitudes from the Grecian Urn scene. Later that day in class, he proceeded to make me read that portion of the memoir and act out the appropriate attitude, culminating in "Despair" which involved a deep sigh and the flinging of my hand across my brow. That remains one of my most ridiculously embarrassing but still enjoyable experiences from Bryn Mawr and the people I took that class with still make reference to that memorable event and the inspiring stories from this collection.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thankfully, this book was a good portion of the reading for a creative non-fiction writing class I took during my second-to-last semester of undergraduate. This book includes the whole text of "The Star Thrower," my introduction to Loren Eiseley, who is an acquired taste but a brilliant writer. Some other favorites: the selection from Richard Selzer's "Confessions of a Knife," the selection from Frederick Buechner's "The Sacred Journey," and the selection from "Stop-Time" by Frank Conroy. But really this book is a collection of good snippets, at best a spring board into bigger things.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each chapter of this book is from a different memoir by American writers, curated by Annie Dillard and Curt Conley. I read to help me choose a couple of memoirs to put on my reading list and because I was so pleased to have the recommendations of Annie Dillard, an outstanding memoir writer herself. Almost every chapter was vividly written and drew me into the writer's experience despite the fact that each was only a short portion of a longer work. I'm putting Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead onto my reading list, as I found their chapters particularly compelling.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is some delightful reading here. I really liked Hamlin Garland's description of his farm life from Son of the Middle Border. I aspire to the fluid, lyrical, descriptive style that reads easily and keeps the story moving forward. Also, James McConkey's Hector Dick and I was very symbolic and insightful. There is much to learn from the biographies of these individuals.

[Kristin]

I was about halfway through the book, essays not thrilling me very much anyway, and then I realized the authors seem a bit too light on women for my tastes, thereafter losing any of the remaining interest I had.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed about half of these memoir excerpts. Some were older and written in styles I haven't cared for, across fiction and nonfiction. Some topics were boring. Overall, a great book for reading when you wake up in the middle of the night and can't sleep.

[Nikelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a really good book.My favorite was the autobiography by Malcolm-X and the Biography of Zora Neil Hurston those were great

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

For my creative writing class.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excerpts from the memoirs of many twentieth century writers.

[Marlene Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this as a book on tape for the Idaho Society for the Blind when I lived in Boise. I wonder how many people listened to me read this book to them?

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memoir is a very tricky animal, maybe much trickier than fiction or straight nonfiction. It requires the author to talk about themselves, which we’re taught—most of us at least—from an early age is an unbecoming trait. There’s even an old cautionary saying on the subject, which I’ll probably mangle since it’s a long time since I’ve heard it. It goes something like this, though: Small minds talk about themselves; normal minds talk about others; and great minds talk about ideas.
How to circumvent the expectation of solipsism that comes from a genre as me-centric as memoir, then? The best of the bunch, excerpted here, seem to focus more on the author’s environment than on the authors themselves. Either that or they focus on how their experiences revealed things about the nature of the world, either its indifference or its harshness, to them. Some of the sensory details related from childhood brought back similar memories from my own childhood, the tastes of food, some long-dead aunt’s perfume.
My favorite in the bunch would either be the contribution from Harry Crews—born in Bacon County, Georgia—or the piece by Zora Hurston Neale. Crews describes his hardscrabble childhood, growing up “without enough money to cover a dead man’s eyes,” or words to that effect. Rather than being self-pitying, though, his tone is so neutral-cadenced (reminiscent of Willeford) that its pains immediately become transmuted to joy, or at least dark humor. The old formulation of time + tragedy = comedy appears to obtain in this instance.
Neale’s memoir excerpt stood out for other reasons, mostly because of its anthropological heft, the colorful way she describes the mores and habits of the people she’s studying. Anyone who’s traveled a lot in America—especially its less frequented byways—knows how virgin and unexplored (and even uncategorizable) a lot of its subcultures are. Neale’s lively offering is a reminder of how much life and strangeness are contained in the average human being living a supposedly humdrum life. And also that memoir needn’t hew to the well-worn and expected format. It can take the form of field research, or, for that matter, a grocery list if one is so inclined. There’s no rulebook (outside of maybe an MFA program) that says the form can’t be as elastic as poetry, especially considering it deals with the most fallible of instruments: memory. Whether or not you want to take liberties, you’re probably going to do so, unless your recall is entirely eidetic.
Other extracts of memoir—too many in fact—struck the same note over and over again. The same sort of self-serious confessional tone, for some reason in the present tense, many times mannered and sometimes tedious. They’re either rote descriptions of work on farms—mostly grim farms in which the soil refuses to yield much anymore and daddy’s an alcoholic. Or they’re present tense descriptions of the culture shock of going from the small town or inner city to the ivy league school. “The first to leave the working class milieu” storyline is pretty much its own subgenre at this point, complete with a raft of cliches and expectations. It can be an interesting and compelling tale—fraught with class tensions and other uncomfortable realities—but there are too many such stories in here. Ditto the aforementioned, “Down on the farm,” tales.
I don’t doubt that the Iowa Writer’s Workshop has found and nurtured some great talents. I think, though, that when everyone enrolls in the same program, has the same teachers, sits through the same seminars, there can’t help but be a sameness to the resultant prose. Ironing out imperfections might also eradicate the idiosyncrasies that help define individual styles. H.P. Lovecraft would have undoubtedly not survived the prof’s red pen unscathed, and would have come out sounding more like Raymond Carver than the eldritch weirdo he turned out to be.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Carver—he’s great actually—but one was enough, and now there are hundreds, maybe thousands.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A large collection of excerpts from memoirs and essays. Most are from published authors, but I guess that is who wrote and knew how to get things published. Many felt like relaying of facts to me. I find I am more interested in lyrical writing and introspection. I think an anthology like this put together today would include more diversity and different types of memoirs. I am happy that I spent my time reading it, but don't think I'd suggest it to others. There were a few outstanding excerpts by authors that I would like to read more of.

[Rob Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was hit & miss as you would expect because you're sampling a variety of styles. I really enjoyed many of these. Strongly recommended!

[Kelsie Oreta · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had far too many snippets from old, white guys. It’s an anthology that was collected in the 1990’s, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

What did surprise me, however, was that there was a full exert that was a story about some white guy playing yo-yo. YO-YO. There were a few stories that were intriguing, but I just couldn’t get back into this book.

It took far too long of this remaining in my nightstand drawer for me realize that an anthology of memoirs is a disservice to memoir writing. A memoir is authored by someone ready to bare all, to finally stand up and speak their truth, their reasoning behind x, y and z. It exists to tell the story and bare all of the roots that introspection digs up.

A snippet of a memoir doesn’t give that. Memoir isn’t meant to be an anecdote, it’s meant to be an understanding. These snippets disallowed me to connect deeply to the authors and illuminate aspects of myself the way that the full forms of their work could.

When I picked this up in the bargain bin, I thought it would introduce me to more styles of memoir writing. Rather, it taught me that anthology and short stories are not what I plan to pick up in the future.

[Dnicebear · Rating 5 out of 5]

Editor Annie Dillard packs this book with superb writing. I happened to read James Baldwin right on Martin Luther King Day--what a gift. Soon thereafter came John Wideman who helps us see his parents and their contexts so well. As an example about his father: "Wagons once upon a time in the streets of Pittsburgh. Delivering ice and milk and coal. Sinking in the mud, trundling over cobblestones, echoing in the sleep of a man who works all day in the mouth of a fiery furnace, who dreams of green fish gliding along the clear, stony bottom of a creek in South Carolina. In the twenty years between 1910 and 1930, the black population of Pittsburgh increased by nearly fifty thousand."

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an anthology of American memoir writing from the 20th century. It's an amazing collection of diverse American voices. Reading these excerpts is like listening to a room full of fascinating people. Each voice is unique and revelatory. I loved it. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in American history, American culture, memoir writing or discovering new writers. There were a lot of writers in here that I never heard of but will check out now.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memoir synonyms are journal, record, log, chronicle and account. I missed the ever present opening, body and conclusion found in other writing forms.

I would recommend reading this book because you will find authors you can't wait to read.

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

Part of my class this semester... I know I finished it and I don't remember it.

[Suanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent compilation of excerpts from memoir. I've enjoyed several of them enough to order the book.

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely spellbinding.