 | My Confession Recollections of a Rogue by Samuel Chamberlain,annotated and with an introduction by William H. Goetzmann |
Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue is a classic, ribald tale of nineteenth-century life. Perhaps the best-written account of a soldier's adventures and misadventures in the Mexican War and its aftermath, this unexpurgated edition is now available for the first time, complete with 160 of Chamberlain's wonderful textual illustrations reproduced in full color. If you enjoyed the Chamberlain paintings assembled in Sam Chamberlain's Mexican War: The San Jacinto Museum of History Paintings, you will be fascinated by the tale in My Confession that goes with it and beyond it into Chamberlain’s adventures with the scalp-hunting Glanton Gang (the story that Cormac McCarthy used as the basis for his celebrated novel Blood Meridian).
My Confession is the story of Samuel Chamberlain, a Boston boy who hoped to be a theological student but could not control his amorous and pugilistic inclinations and so left for the West. According to his "Confession," he seduced countless women in the U.S. and Mexico, never missed a fandango, fought gallantly against Mexican guerrillas, and rode with the 1st Dragoons into the Battle of Buena Vista. His remarkable story in My Confession is pure melodrama, but Goetzmann has proven by his painstaking research that much of it is true.
In extensive annotation, the editor has been able to separate what is truth from fiction in an account that virtually every historian of the Mexican War has used as a source.
WILLIAM H. GOETZMANN is the Jack S. Blanton, Sr., Professor of American History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of many award-winning books and articles, including Exploration and Empire, which won the Pulitzer Prize for American History in 1967.
My Confession
ISBN 0-87611-156-8 cloth $60.00s
ISBN 0-87611-157-6 limited edition $165.00x
LC 96-31788. 10x13. 400 pp.
160 color plates. Illus. Maps. Index.
Western History. Military History. Texas History.
Publication Date: January 1997.
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