Working class autobiographies “illuminated how social position, or location in social hierarchies, [were] internalized as identity” (Maynes 3). Where otherwise the only source of information of the past would be statistics and those of historians, the autobiographies give the reader a feel of what the working classes were going through in a more personal way. The conditions in which they lived and the politics or beliefs they lived by can be examined for differences or qualities they might share. Unfortunately, there are many difficulties in autobiographies.
The working class rarely wrote autobiographies themselves. Often the autobiographers were, although they were classified as working-class, more then the average worker. They had a greater grasp of their reading and writing skills then the average laborer and usually thought themselves exemplary enough in some way to justify an autobiography. Maynes reveals, “The views they [the autobiographers] reveal come from a very......
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