The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves (1906)

from reviews of the first Routledge edition:

Entirely charming
Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
A marvelous little book … . With no varnish or self-pity, … people who never achieved anything notable (except decency and dignity) tell the stories of their lives. A Chinese laundry-man, a Polish woman sweatshop worker, a farm wife–all considered themselves ordinary and all were extraordinary. Heroes come in a lot of funny shapes.
Molly Ivins, Ms Magazine
To see the Florida seabed through a Conch sponge fisherman’s water glass is as rich and strange as to sit in a Lithuanian log house at the turn of the century and listen, with a boy’s ears, to an old shoemaker reading subversive literature… The voices that emerge [are] as vivid as the scratchings of an Edison cylinder.
Edmund Morris, The New Yorker
The so-called undistinguished Americans generally speak in their own words; at times their writing is rough-hewn, even mundane, but informed with the rousing emotions of immigrants trying to succeed in a new land, of native-born Americans struggling against the prejudices of their fellow countrymen. The book recreates a bygone era by serving up the stuff of day-to-day life.
Publishers Weekly
Hamilton Holt, editor of The Independent , collected these touching autobiographies of ordinarypeople–new immigrants and sharecroppers, cooks and fishermen, women and men working in sweatshops, in the city, and on the land. First published in 1906, and reissued a decade ago, this new edition of Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans is expanded to include lives Holt did not include in his original selection, as well as a new preface by Werner Sollors.