This book represents an ambitious and interesting project, seeking to interpret a wide range of historians’ autobiographies—European and American—from the 1920s to the present. The result is, as the author intends, a genuine, and distinctive, contribution to contemporary historiography, and—with slightly less certainty—a commentary on larger developments in modern intellectual history.
Aurell seeks to identify several generational clusters of autobiography, though this approach works better in some instances than in others. In the interwar decades, a number of European historians—including Benedetto Croce and Robin George Collingwood—employed a humanistic emphasis to highlight the role of their discipline in responding to the troubles of this time. In contrast, soon after World War II, several American practitioners, including Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., and William Langer, used autobiography to emphasize the growing professionalism of the field in the United States.
The 1980s saw the emergence of ego-histoire, primarily in France, highlighting the intellectual journeys of...