The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 95, July 1991 - April, 1992 Page: 499
598 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Privately Published Autobiographies
must read and interpret the Texans' autobiographies on the two lev-
els that Stone identifies-the personally particular and the socially
shared-to gain valuable information about Texas culture.
Most if not all of the autobiographers included in the bibliography
are not well-known public personalities involved in celebrated state-
wide activities. Autobiographies by those more famous Texans will be
published commercially and distributed widely throughout the state
and country, available to diverse audiences. Unlike their famous and
commercial counterparts, the private citizens who wrote and published
their life histories are everyday Texans who desired to preserve their
private memories of the events, people, and places they knew. Often
they wrote to express their ideas, opinions, thoughts, and philosophies
on paper before they died. Leaving more public narratives of well-
known historical events to the professional historians, the autobiogra-
phers instead filled their own pages with private experiences and mem-
ories. Commonly their autobiographies tell stories that are familiar to
many Texans from similar backgrounds or time periods. Authors de-
scribe the rural schoolhouses they attended as children, their participa-
tion in camp meetings during their youths, the circumstances of their
courtships and marriages, the births of children, and the paths they fol-
lowed settling on careers. Admittedly, a reader expecting the well-
crafted high drama of commercial texts edited by a team of profes-
sionals will find these less skillful books a little dry. But in that seeming
dryness is also a potential richness. For these are stories uncensored by
a commercial publisher's decisions about what would sell copies and
uninhibited by the risk of writing for a nameless and faceless unknown
audience. Everyday people tell their stories to record their histories of
Texas over the past 150 years-rich material researchers rarely find
elsewhere.
The autobiographers record their memories of community person-
alities, local legends, and small-town events partially because this is the
information they knew best; partially because this is the information
they felt most needed to be preserved (sometimes for fear that "his-
tory" would record the larger, objective stories but not these local anec-
dotes); and partially because this is the information their intended au-
dience would also know best. For the most part the authors wrote the
books with an a priori intention of publishing a limited number of
copies to distribute to a selected audience of family and friends.j Typi-
5Some authors did publish the stories with the intention of selling them for a personal profit
or for donations to causes with which they were associated But even with those intentions, the
buying public was expected to be a small community familiar if not with the author then with
the setting of his/her story499
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 95, July 1991 - April, 1992, periodical, 1992; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117153/m1/575/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.