Two images of Olaudah Equiano. L: frontispeice of Equiano's autobiography | R: detail from portrait in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter

"[Benjamin Franklin's] is just the kind of story that clever people tell about their lives: meaningful, useful, and, quite possibly, not altogether true." --Jill Lepore, "Back Issues" (The New Yorker 26 January 2009)

"Identity! My God! Who has any identity any more anyway?" --Young Emerson, in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man