“Many of us will find it’s a hard task

In June 1865, The Soldier’s Friend organized a penmanship contest open only to Union veterans whose combat injuries had required them to relearn penmanship with their left hands. This essay considers this corpus of handwriting exemplars for two purposes: the study of letter writing and disability identity and the pedagogical potential of those letters. This essay is interested in genre theory’s insight about what Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley have called the letter’s “permanently leaky borders” with other writing engaging disability identity. This case study of public disability autobiography prompts questions about what happens when the serious work of composing text in response to a prompt from an authority fades to reveal the affordances of the letter genre. In this space, eight writers integrate into their identity (or avoid) a sense of themselves as disabled. These writers perform (or obscure) that self to audiences of their own imagining using the letter genre as a scaffold

Affordance · Anonymity · Biography · CONTEST · Handwriting · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Biographical and Historical Analysis · Literature: history, themes, analysis