Paul Radin's Autobiography of a Winnebego Indian (1926) is the story of Sam Blowsnake (aka Big Winnebago, aka Crashing Thunder), as solicited, transcribed and edited by the anthropologist Paul Radin.
I admired this book as an anthropology major at UVic in the early- to mid-1980s (Radin insists that the narrative is "authentic" because Blowsnake's words were "translated literally,"), but because I was taking electives in English and Political Science, where I was reading French post-structural theory (Derrida, Foucault, et al.), I came to question the authenticity of all narratives.
It was years later that I saw Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and zeroed-in on the fact that it, too, was written by someone other than its titular subject. How vain of Stein, I thought, as I stared at the 1961 Vintage cover of Stein's impatient face, looking off or in profile. Years after that, How accurate, because the book is not about Toklas but the conversation that is Stein and Toklas -- as written by Stein on behalf of someone who, she determined, would never get around to being her Boswell.
A couple summers ago I read Toklas from cover to cover after pecking at it in my bathroom for a year or so prior. A great history of Toklas's life prior to 1933 (she was born in 1877; Stein died in 1946), but also of a Paris scene where artists and writers didn't have children but ideas. In addition to that, political details about the First World War -- an account by two women who were, as they say, in the midst of it. Stuff like this:
"Then came the days of the invasion of Belgium and I can still hear Doctor Whitehead's gentle voice reading the papers out loud and then all of them talking about the destruction of Louvain and how they must help the brave little belgians. Gertrude Stein desparately unhappy said to me, where is Louvain. Don't you know, I said. No, she said, nor do I care, but where is it." (147)
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