SOURCE: "Modern Black Autobiography in the Tradition," in Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continuities, edited by David Thorburn and Geoffrey Hartman, Cornell University Press, No. 1973, pp. 255-80.

In the following essay, Cooke discusses the autobiographical writings of Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver, three African American writers who have made "evolutionary contributions to the form of western autobiography. "

Introduction: Autobiography

In terms of literature, Jung's antinomian law, "that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule,"¹ may have been framed for autobiography. Paradox inheres in the form, which calls for personal uniqueness and yet depends on a cogent general category—the definition of self achieved by one autobiographer must be both genuine and inimitable, and cannot lend itself to use by others without leading to a certain forgery. Critically speaking, we can be sure when generality has been taken too far, as in Gibbon's refusing to...