Sheppard Lee Written By Himself

Robert Montgomery Bird, Christopher Looby

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English

NYRB Classics
15 July 2007

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

This strange and compelling story is a penetrating critique of American life and values as well as a crucial addition to the canon of American literature.

Originally published

in 1836.

Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself

is a work of dark satire from the early years of the American Republic. Published as an autobiography and praised by Edgar Allan Poe, this is the story of a young idler who goes in search of buried treasure and finds instead the power to transfer his soul into other men's bodies. What follows is oneincreasingly practiced body snatcher'spicaresque journey through early American pursuits of happiness, as each new form Sheppard Lee assumes disappoints him anew while making him want more and more. When Lee's metempsychosis draws him into the marriage market, the money market, and the slave market, Bird's fable of American upward mobility takes a more sinister turn. Lee learns that everything in America, even virtue and vice, are interchangeable; everything is an object and has its price.

Looking forward to Melville's The Confidence-Man and beyond that to William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, this strange and compelling story is a penetrating critique of American life and values as well asa crucial addition to the canon of American literature.

By: Robert Montgomery Bird
Introduction by: Christopher Looby
Imprint: NYRB Classics
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: Main
Dimensions: Height: 202mm, Width: 25mm, Spine: 128mm
Weight: 490g
ISBN: 9781590172292
ISBN 10: 1590172299
Pages: 472
Publication Date: 15 July 2007
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Robert Montgomery Bird (1803-1854) was born in Delaware and raised in Philadelphia. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from its medical school in 1824. After practicing medicine for only a year, he started writing, eventually becoming the editor of American Monthly Magazine. He is best known for his plays The Gladiator and The Broker of Bogota and his novels Calavar, The Infidel, and Nick of the Woods. Christopher Looby holds an M.A. in American literature and history from Washington University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. A former associate editor for The Library of America, he currently teaches English at UCLA.

Reviews for Sheppard Lee Written By Himself

Sheppard Lee is an antebellum novel like no other: a psychological picaresque in which the narrator survives the death of his body only to possess a succession of corpses as a spirit. Moving up and down the social and economic ladder in New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Virginia, Sheppard Lee embodies, among other identities, a gouty brewer, a miserly moneylender, and a slave. Equal parts comedy of manners, satire of sentimentality, and critique of antebellum political culture, Sheppard Lee also offers a vivid portrait of early American life. <br>-- Justine Murison, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign <br> An unjustly forgotten masterpiece, Sheppard Lee inspired Poe's tales of metempsychosis, 'The Gold Bug, ' and the juiciest parts of Melville's Israel Potter. It also gave Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom his name. This novel of lost bodies and wandering spirits, with slavery's transformations of persons into things as background, introduces that 'other' American Renais