The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves

from reviews of the first Routledge edition: "Entirely charming" Jonathan Yardley,Washington Post "A marvelous little book . . . . With no varnish or self-pity, . . . people who never achieved anything notable (except decency and dignity) tell the stories of their lives. A Chinese laundry-man, a Polish woman sweatshop worker, a farm wife--all considered themselves ordinary and all were extraordinary. Heroes come in a lot of funny shapes." Molly Ivins,Ms Magazine "To see the Florida seabed through a Conch sponge fisherman's water glass is as rich and strange as to sit in a Lithuanian log house at the turn of the century and listen, with a boy's ears, to an old shoemaker reading subversive literature... The voices that emerge [are] as vivid as the scratchings of an Edison cylinder." EdmundMorris, The New Yorker "The so-called undistinguished Americans generally speak in their own words; at times theirwriting is rough-hewn, even mundane, but informed with the rousing emotions of immigrants trying to succeed in a new land, of native-born Americans struggling against the prejudices of their fellow countrymen. The book recreates a bygone era by serving up the stuff of day-to-day life." Publishers Weekly Hamilton Holt, editor ofThe Independent, collected these touching autobiographies of ordinary people--new immigrants and sharecroppers, cooks and fishermen, women and men working in sweatshops, in the city, and on the land. First published in 1906, and reissued a decade ago, this new edition ofLife Stories of Undistinguished Americansis expanded to include lives Holt did not include in his original selection, as well as a new preface by Werner Sollors.