Slippery characters

Between the 1820s and 1990s, many American writers left behind identities they no longer wanted by publishing life stories under invented ethnic backgrounds. Laura Browder calls these works ethnic impersonator autobiographies. Her examples include Sylvester Long, a Black janitor who became Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance in the 1920s, and Elizabeth Stern, a German and Welsh American who wrote as an immigrant Jewish woman in I Am a Woman and a Jew. Asa Carter, once a speechwriter for George Wallace, later wrote The Education of Little Tree, a supposed Cherokee memoir that was in fact his own invention.

Browder observes that these fabricated autobiographies cluster around moments of upheaval in American life, such as the years before the Civil War, the 1920s, when immigration and Native American policy were being rewritten, and the civil rights era. Her study covers works produced from the 1830s through the 1990s and places them against the abolition movement, Wild West shows, blackface performance, and jazz, along with more recent debates over those same traditions.

The book shows how these counterfeit life stories influenced ideas about who Americans were and how identity could be claimed, performed, and believed.