Abstract
This chapter focuses on William Apess's autobiography A Son of the Forest, which chronicles his spiritual pilgrimage as a Methodist. On July 25, 1829, the clerk of court for the Southern District of New York registered to Apess the copyright for A Son of the Forest. Apess revised the book in 1831, removing his criticism of and reasons for withdrawal from the Methodist Episcopal Church. Structuring A Son of the Forest as a Christian conversion narrative, Apess followed certain well-established signposts for the genre. The most important thing that Apess offered in his autobiography was an account of his gradually increasing realization of how Christianity provided Native Americans a set of arguments through which to criticize American society. The book includes a lengthy appendix, most of which is borrowed verbatim from Elias Boudinot's A Star in the West; or, An Humble Attempt to Discover the Long Lost Tribes of Israel, Preparatory to Their Return to Their Beloved City, Jerusalem (1816).
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