Of McCourt and Memoir

Interesting series of articles over at the New York Times about Frank McCourt's influence on the writing of memoirs (read it here). Various writers and publishers comment on the flood of memoirs that followed McCourt's, some mourning that the Golden Age of memoir has passed. But Jay Parini reminds us that "memoirs have always been the central form of American literature," adding, "The reason for this, I suspect is that the United States has always been about singing one's self, as Walt Whitman might say. The individual stands in for society. His or her story is rapidly taken as democratic." He situates McCourt in a long line of memoir-writers including William Bradford, Ben Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, and Booker T. Washington.

"I love memoirs and read them voraciously," writes Parini, "and there is some truth in the idea that Frank McCourt deepened the public appetite for similar books. It is not surprising that most of them are not first-rate. Why should this be the case? Only a handful of amazing works in any genre appear within a decade, and this remains true of memoirs."