Introduction

This ensemble of papers is devoted to the campaign autobiographies of several of the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential candidates. And in doing so, these papers also reprise a forum in American Literary History from 2012 (vol. 24, no. 3) that studied presidential writings, including texts written both before elections and after administrations.

Each essay collected here explores the character and momentum of one of those candidates’ stories. Bringing together these perspectives on the various memoirs, in turn, offers a greater focus on a genre that has not always gotten scholarly and critical scrutiny. By studying these autobiographies as both a group and in their individual interests, the essays highlight something more about the candidates than readers might ordinarily get to see. So while it would have been gratifying to have even more candidates represented, our purpose was always to pursue the interest of these political memoirs as a form of cultural expression, rather than to speculate about which candidates would still be in the race by Super Tuesday and which will have had to “suspend operations.” Some of the entries in our forum focus on candidates who are still very much in the discussion; some, on candidates who made a surprising impression but who ultimately faded; and a couple are engaging reflections on candidates whose campaigns never did get much traction. Yet wherever the candidates stood, we’ve wanted to examine how they were forwarding the sense of their past and their vision of our future.

Beyond the wide and diverse array of campaign writing to consider, I trust that readers will find our participants’ incisive and imaginative analyses instructive and challenging. While perhaps none of these essays will change your mind about which, if any, of the candidates you may be supporting, they may quicken your interest in the genre of campaign autobiography and the rhetoric of candidacy.