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Mark Twain began compiling his autobiography in 1905. He described it as a “systemless system” resting on three motives. Writing, especially free-writing, was, to him, intensely therapeutic. Autobiographical writing was also, for “the most famous man on earth,” as Robertus Love called Twain upon his death, a concession to the emergent voyeuristic lust for celebrity gossip which had been mobilized by the explosion of mass media during the 19th century. Twain knew, as few writers before him could have, that there would be an enduring market for his private ramblings, regardless of how self-indulgent, meandering, and scandalous he chose to make them. Finally, the least well-known motive behind Twain’s autobiographical method was his intention to create a practically inexhaustible archive of unpublished material in which his books could be paratextually wrapped, thus preserving their copyrights according to the law of his day, and creating income for his surviving children and grandchildren.

Twain had prophesized that his would become “a model for all future autobiographies.” It seems he was right. In the century from the preparation of the autobiography to its publication, personal narrative has become customary in every literary genre. In this new episode of The American Vandal Podcast, Matt Seybold speaks with two decorated literary critics and theorists who aren’t so thrilled about this trend. 

The personal essay boom never ended. Instead, the personal essay quietly colonised other genres, beginning with the so-called literary review essay.

— Merve Emre (@mervatim) February 24, 2021

Episode Bibliography

James Baldwin, “Stranger In The Village” (Harper’s, October 1953)

Melinda Cooper, “Family Capitalism & The Small Business Insurrection” (Dissent, Winter 2022)

T. S. Eliot, “Tradition & The Individual Talent” (The Egoist, 1919)

Merve Emre, “Patricia Lockwood’s First Novel Reaches For The Sublime, Online.” (New York Times, 2.16.2021)

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2009)

John Guillory, from “On The Uses & Abuses of Literary Scholarship For Life” (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 10.11.2021)

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 1989)

Heidi Julavits, “Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Touch of Evil” (New York Times, 9.28.2021)

Anna Kornbluh, “Climate Realism, Capitalist & Otherwise” (Mediations, Spring 2020)

Anna Kornbluh, “Immediacy: On Style Lately” (UIC Institute For The Humanities Faculty Fellow Lecture, 2.17.2021)

Leigh Claire La Berge & Alison Shonkwiler, Reading Capitalist Realism (U Iowa P, 2014)

Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This (Riverhead, 2021)

Georg Lukács, The Theory of The Novel (1916)

Anna Kornbluh, Marxist Film Theory & Fight Club (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Annabel Kim, “Autofiction Infiltrated: Anna Garréta’s Pas un jour“ (PMLA, May 2018)

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star (Penguin Random House, 2021)

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Graywolf, 2016)

Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry For The Future (Orbit, 2020)

Matt Seybold, “Death at Christmastime: Mark Twain & The Music of Merciful Release” (CMTS, 12.23.2020)

Matt Seybold, “Neoliberal Rationality in The Old Gilded Age” (CMTS, 10.5.2018)

Jia Tolentino, “The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over” (The New Yorker, 5.18.2017)

Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain (U. California P, 2010-2015)

Christy Vannoy, “A Personal Essay By A Personal Essay” (McSweeney’s, 3.10.2010)

Virginia Woolf, “The Decay of Essay Writing” (1905)

The World’s Work was a business-friendly publication which Mark Twain sometimes satirized and these episodes feature conversations about the past, present, and potential future of work.