Autobiography has a double nature; it is both historical and literary. Particular autobiographies may embody aspects of this duality with varying degrees of purity or mixture, but, just as importantly, these two qualities are constituted by the approach taken by the interpreters of the texts. From a historical point of view an autobiography may be seen either as a source of data for biographical studies or as one biography among others — it is essentially a historical record, a source of information about the occurrence, sequence, and pattern of events. From a literary perspective an autobiography can be taken as a dramatic recounting of a particular period of time or as an imaginative presentation of a character from a unique perspective. Whereas questions about accuracy, comprehensiveness, and distortion might occupy the historian, matters of form, style, intention, and effect would interest the literary critic. This essay seeks to contribute to the study of religious autobiography, first, by relating these two perspectives to the psychological concepts of identity and generativity, and second, by examining a shift in the development of the Protestant ethic¹ as it is reflected in the autobiographical writings of John Bunyan and Benjamin Franklin.