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Reviewed by:
  • The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura
  • Joshua David Bellin (bio)
The Life of William Apess, Pequot philip f. gura Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015 216 pp.

Why do we need a new biography of William Apess?

When numerous scholars including Barry O’Connell, Bernd Peyer, Robert Allen Warrior, Maureen Konkle, and others have authored substantial biographical studies of the antebellum Pequot activist, I think that’s a fair question to ask. To justify its existence, a new biography of Apess should uncover new materials, forge new links, propose new directions, offer new interpretations, or attract new audiences (or all of the preceding). If not, the argument could be made that it’s redundant.

Measured against the foregoing, how does Philip F. Gura’s The Life of William Apess, Pequot fare? Modestly. On the plus side, Gura’s book does suggest several new contexts for Apess’s life; though based largely on established sources—Apess’s own writings, as well as those of O’Connell and other Apess scholars—and structured largely on the oft-rehearsed plotline of Apess’s rise and fall, the book offers compelling hints about the foundations of Apess’s religious and political radicalism, as well as useful background regarding the world in which he lived. Less productively, Gura makes a plea for Apess’s historical significance that is anything but new. Even more problematically, the author claims for his book an audience that, given what his book is, I do not consider realistically within its reach.

In his prologue, which delves into the circumstances of Apess’s death, Gura asks how Apess was so quickly forgotten in his own time and has remained so little remembered in ours. Writing that “today [Apess] is known primarily among scholars of Native American studies,” Gura argues that “Apess deserves the same widespread recognition as others in the antebellum period who questioned the sincerity of the nation’s ongoing commitment to democracy, a cohort of reformers that includes Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, champions of women’s rights; Frances Wright and Orestes Brownson, of the dignity of labor; and William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass, of African American freedom and equality” (xiii–xiv). Few scholars of American or Native American literature will dispute this assertion of Apess’s importance; indeed, many have made statements like it before. The question of [End Page 212] whether a book such as Gura’s is likely to raise Apess’s public profile is, however, worth asking. Gura submits that Apess’s general anonymity is attributable to the fact that his biographers thus far “have too often aimed [their] works at scholarly communities rather than at the larger public” (xvi). However true this may be, Gura’s book—which is published by a scholarly press, blurbed by scholarly reviewers, and packed with scholarly apparati—strikes me as insufficiently distinct from the studies he criticizes to achieve ends other than theirs. (Indeed, the fact that he contrasts Apess’s obscurity with the supposed renown of figures like Fuller, Wright, and Walker underscores his own faithfulness to a “scholarly community”; for who, other than a statistically tiny pool of historians and literary critics, has ever heard of these people?) If by “widespread recognition” Gura means “recognition among highly educated people,” then his mission has already been accomplished: Apess is at least as well known among those with advanced degrees as is, say, Brownson. If, however, the goal is to make Apess better known to a “larger public” of nonacademics, I would suggest that what we need is not a “straightforward account of Apess’s life and times” (xvi) but a narrative history such as those written by Erik Larson or David McCullough, whose books wear their immense scholarship lightly, appealing to a mass audience not through erudition but through brisk storytelling, vivid character portraits, and (on occasion) deviations from strict documentary accuracy in the interest of spinning a good yarn.

Gura’s book offers none of this. It is, instead, a carefully researched and clearly written—a straightforward—scholarly reconstruction of Apess’s life, with few flourishes and much documentation. It covers such...

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