Autobiography, Biography
&
Memoir Conference
INTRODUCTION
Jon Westling:
It's a great pleasure for me as president of Boston Uni–
versity to welcome all of you to this conference on "Autobiography,
Biography
&
Memoir" sponsored by
Partisan Review
and Boston Uni–
versity.
Partisan Review
has a long and illustrious history of recognizing
and nurturing intelligent young writers who later became celebrated
authors. It's a journal that has woven itself into the biographies of many
of today's notable novelists, essayists, and cultural critics. Having
helped to launch many a writer on his or her life's journey, it now seems
only fitting that
Partisall Review
has asked some writers to share the
logs of their voyages and their efforts to recover the trajectories of other
lives.
Partisall Review,
of course, has also entered the biography of Boston
University. The journal has been published at and substantially under–
written by the university since the late
1970S
under the continual edi–
torship of its founder, William Phillips, and his associate, Edith
Kurzweil. The relationship between
Partisan Review
and BU might be
described as an exogamous marriage. The journal has its own deep
roots in New York City, where William and Edith live, but it is edited
and produced in a Bay State Road brownstone here in the Back Bay, and
in consequence, I think its New York edges have acquired over the years
a little of Boston's reserve-even occasiona ll y a bit of a Boston accent.
New England, though, it seems to me, has been perhaps somewhat
less fertile soil for autobiography, biography, and memoir than other
parts of this country. Our reticence to speak on our own behalf has after
all been legendary ever since Priscilla Mullen's rebuke of John Olden for
approaching her on Miles Standish's behalf: "Why don't you speak for
yourself, John?" Ben Franklin, our nation's first great autobiographer,
had to hie himself down to Philadelphia to find enough self-confidence
to tell his own story. It's only with Thoreau that the New England indi–
vidua li st begins to find a way
to
sing a song of himself.
I mention these historical bearings because they point to the excep–
tional circumstance that confronts us today. The arts of autobiography,
biography, and memoir now have unprecedented popularity. They are
clearly not new arts, indeed they are very old ones, though now often
