Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (Annotated)

Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (1836) is one of the most inventive fictions of the American Renaissance before its canonical moment: a comic, satirical tale of a feckless New Jersey farmer whose spirit passes from body to body after death. Through these successive embodiments—among the wealthy, the ambitious, the enslaved, and the socially respectable—Bird constructs a picaresque meditation on i...