The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans

This collection of short autobiographies, compiled and edited by Hamilton Holt, offers eye-opening accounts of how ordinary Americans lived and worked at the turn of the 20th century. The contributors to this collection were anonymous, drawn from various vocations of American society. The occupations range from laborers to dressmakers to domestic servants to peddlars and bootblacks. A minority of the accounts are dictated, but the bulk are written or edited from manuscripts solicited by the original publisher. We witness a society which had, owing to decades of immigration from around the world, become industrious and diverse. Several contributors to this collection are first generation immigrants; for many the conditions of the United States at the time were jarringly different. Some yearn for their homelands, and for the comforts and customs which they left behind, while others openly admire the attitude and values of the country they have come to call home.