The Life Stories Of Undistinguished Americans As Told By Themselves (1906)

"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."
Edmund Morris, The New Yorker
"The so-called undistinguished Americans generally speak in their own words; at times their writing 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 of "The Independent", collected these touching autobiographies of ordinarypeople--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 of "Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans" is expanded to include lives Holt did not include in his original selection, as well as a new preface by Werner Sollors.