John Andrew Rice's autobiography, first published to critical acclaim in 1942, is a remarkable tour through late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. When the book was suppressed by the publisher soon after its appearance because of legal threats by a college president described in the book, the nation lost a rich first-person historical account of race and class relations during a critical period--not only during the days of Rice's youth, but at the dawn of the civil rights movement.
I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century begins with Rice's childhood on a South Carolina...