In 1931, Jane Addams, co-founder of Hull-House of Chicago, the most celebrated settlement house in the United States, received the Nobel Peace Prize for leadership in social reform and world peace. An outspoken proponent of woman's suffrage, Addams was also recognized for her important contributions to women and child laborers, juvenile delinquents, and immigrants living in urban slums. A contributing factor to her influence at home and abroad was TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE, Addams' autobiography published in 1910 describing her beginnings in small-town America followed by two decades of labor to ameliorate social problems in Chicago and beyond. In the narrative, Addams devoted a full chapter to her education at a relatively unknown women's school in northern Illinois, Rockford Female Seminary, where she received one of the institution's first Bachelor of Arts degrees in 1882. Addams' narrative placed her in the role of a heroine rising triumphant from battles with bad health, obscurantism, religious oppression, graft, and greed.In previous writings, I used conventional methods of historical research to reveal the sometimes gross distortions in Addams' autobiography. In this paper, I re-examine these distortions by drawing on current writings in physiological research, memory theory, and literary theory. For example, cognitive psychologists, clinicians, and neuroscientists have used new neuroimaging techniques to examine the brain at work, and have come to consensus about how people encode bits and pieces of experiences and draw from them to construct memories. Such memories often have distortions arising from the loss of memory about sources of knowledge, the tendency to place oneself at the center of all previous actions, and the tendency to shift the narrative so that one's self identity and current status remain intact. These and other findings, as well as current theories about how memories are structured and how they are shaped by prompts, audience, and conventional narrative structures solve some old puzzles and raise new questions about autobiographical truth. The integration of historical, psychological, and literary writings to reflect on the "truth" of an influential American autobiography is especially useful given the prevalence of self-narrative as a from of inquiry in teacher education, educational history, women's studies, multicultural studies, educational psychology, and educational sociology.