INTRODUCTION BY FWP
 

Of all things, surely we don't need another etext of Gandhi's Autobiography? In principle I agree, dear reader, but in practice I think this one will come in handy. It's true that the whole work is available at *Mahatma.org*, but they follow the extremely irritating practice of paginating the whole thing as though it were the original small book, so that you have to be constantly clicking an arrow and waiting for the next page to appear, and you can't easily scroll ahead or back to find something you might want. Since I'm going to use Part One of this work in a class this fall, I thought of making something a bit more convenient for my students, with each chapter given its own page. Then of course I realized it might be useful to everybody's students, so I should make it available to the public.

In the process, I've also corrected quite a number of typos in the etext, a few of them involving even whole omitted lines. The edition from which I've done the correcting is the Beacon Press one (1957 and later reprints), an authorized American edition published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association. In general I've followed this source text quite steadfastly. All footnotes are from this source text, and all the paragraphing is that of the source text. Not even one single word of it has been changed. In some cases I've corrected minor errors of punctuation in the source text, mostly involving commas. A few editorial annotations of my own appear in square brackets; mostly these are designed to clarify possible points of confusion for students.

My reward for this work has been to have an occasion to closely reread the Autobiography-- especially my favorite Part One, Gandhi's account of his childhood and his youthful days in England. After doing Part One, I found that I couldn't resist  going ahead and adding the rest of this altogether remarkable, enjoyable, admirable, irritating, unpredictable, endlessly thought-provoking work.

Fran Pritchett
August 2006

This etext was completed over the Christmas holidays, December 2006-January 2007, in Little Rock, and I dedicate it with much affection to my wonderful mother and my dear friend Pratt Remmel.