The Comstocks of Cornell: The Definitive Autobiography

摘要

What if you realize that a published autobiography is noticeably different from the manuscript that the autobiography is based on? If you have a penchant for naturalist educator Anna Botsford Comstock, who in this case wrote the manuscript, and you are a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, you might give thought to restoring and reconstructing Anna Comstock’s voice in its entirety. Karen Penders St. Clair did just that with her newly edited publication, The Comstocks of Cornell: The Definitive Autobiography. Her work to revise and update Anna Comstock’s diaries took five years of archival research and a patient, sentence-by-sentence comparisons of Anna’s original manuscript to that of an autobiography published in 1953. The result is a noticeably longer text and a grand look at how biologists and biology educators worked, long before the arrival of electron microscopes and genome sequencing.