Part one of term paper
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 i ...

Part two of term paper
... 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 particular location within working-class culture” (43). On page four, Sebastian Commissaire is quoted as declaring in his autobiography, “workers don’t write memoirs.” S ...