Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer
##common.pageHeaderLogo.altText##

Articles

Volume 08, Number 2 (1983)

An Audience in Mind When I Speak: Grove's In Search of Myself

  • Alexandra Collins
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1983-06-06

Abstract

Much of F.P. Grove's writing can be considered autobiography, yet only In Search of Myself records the full development of his personal and artistic life. In form and structure, In Search of Myself echoes Over Prairie Trails and A Search for America, but it spans a much wider field of study. Grove outlines his theories of art and life in relation to the development of civilization, considering himself a microcosm of the evolution of man and expressing a deterministic view of personality. His overall plan is to chart the difficulties of finding an audience for his writing; more interesting, however, is the way he creates a personal myth and a series of masks to hide the painful realities of his past. He directs the story of his life toward the readers of his novels, referring to the origins of those fictions. In an important way, also, he addresses his autobiography to his private self, to his imagination, and he invents a past to account for the person he believes himself to be as an adult.