This study attempts to identify the autobiography of black American women as a tradition. Additionally, it aspires to provide a genuine sense of the meaning of individual "autobiographical acts" in their historical, cultural, and environmental contexts.

Chapter One raises questions about arbitrary criteria that have been used to define the slave narrative genre in such a way that it has excluded women, argues for the authenticity of Harriet "Linda Brent" Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), a narrative whose authorship has been disputed; and advances a discussion of the outraged mother archetype.

Chapter Two studies representative narratives by free born black women of the nineteenth century and the post-emancipation accounts of former slaves, reflecting a shift from the preoccupation with survival to a quest for self-expression and self-identification. The Religious Experiences and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee (1849) and A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1850), represent the works of free-born women. Post emancipation accounts are represented by Mrs. Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes: or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1808) and Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the U.S. 33rd Colored Troops (1902) by Mrs. Susie King Taylor.

Chapter Three, "The Diaries of Charlotte L. Forten," discusses Forten's use of a private autobiographical form, the diary, for recording the growth of her mind and also as a tool of restoration and self-healing.

Chapter Four examines Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1970) which has distinct characteristics common to both nineteenth century narratives and modern autobiographies by black American women.

Chapter Five illustrates the continuing influence of the narrative of vision and power and the narrative of isolation and transcendence in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) and Era Bell Thompson's American Daughter (1946).

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) by Maya Angelou has been chosen as the focus of the concluding chapter for the clarity with which it illustrates that archetypal patterns and narrative concerns established in the early narratives renew themselves in contemporary works by black American women. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)