The Booker T. Washington Papers 1: The Autobiographical Writings

Here is the first of fifteen volumes in a project C. Vann Woodward has called “the single most important research enterprise now under way in the field of American black history.”

Volume 1 contains Washington’s Up from Slavery, one of the most widely read American autobiographies, The Story of My Life and Work, and six other autobiographical writings. They are a good first step toward understanding Washington because they reveal the moral values he absorbed from his min-nineteenth-century experiences and teachers, and they present him to the world as he wished to be seen: the black version of the American success hero and the exemplar of the Puritan work ethic, which he believed to be the secret of his success. His writings served a success model for many blacks who wished to overcome poverty and prejudice.