Autobiographies & Memoirs

What you won't find here: tell-all celebrity confessions ghostwritten by a former member of the staff or entourage.

We like to keep our memoirs classy, and by that we mean literary. We're not saying you should never read just-the-facts-ma'am bios (we suggest you steer clear of the celebrity trash mentioned above), but there's something to be said for reading autobiographical works as good or better than any critically acclaimed novel.

Famous people have been penning reflections on their own lives almost as long as writing and people have existed simultaneously. Even portions of the Old Testament are written in first person, and though subsequent autobiographers have preferred to chronicle themselves in the third person, the fact remains that we generally want to hear how things transpired from the mouths of the principle players themselves.

It's an established fact that a lot of untruth and outright lying goes into memoirs. Authors either want to appear better than they were, want their opponents to appear worse than they were, or simply like to invent stories about themselves (they're writers, after all). But how much can we actually know about someone else's life? and if they're proven untrustworthy as their own narrators, doesn't that say something significant about them, too?

Not all of these are happy books. In fact, most of them aren't "happy" in the sense of things always going well for the protagonists, or things ending well, or even wellness as a general theme. But part of the attraction of the inside scoop is that we get to know and better understand the human condition as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.

Ben Franklin was one of the true geniuses of the American Revolution. In his Autobiography (as though there could, or would, be no other), he talks about being a vegetarian. He permitted himself to eat fish, however, because though they were meat, they ate each other, and were thus unsoiled by the things that usually taint other meats. How would we know this brilliant man could be so illogical were it not for his own record of his own life?

If all autobiographies were similarly entertaining, we'd read them all. They often are, but there are others (like The Lost Executioner, about a genocidal commandant of a Cambodian death camp) that we read for far different reasons. They show us the black human heart, fully exposed. We are terrified when we read these memoirs, and we weep, as often as not because we recognize ourselves in the faces of the men and women on the cover.

Memoirs, whether confessional or obscurantist, are secrets whispered from the author to the reader. Sometimes the author writes as through a megaphone, at other times as though whispering through mittened hands. It's not our job to untangle every objectively true statement from those that aren't. It's our job to listen to the words spoken, and to hear the underlying truth each memoirist conveys.

Review by C. Hollis Crossman
C. Hollis Crossman used to be a child. Now he's a husband and father who loves church, good food, and weird stuff. He might be a mythical creature, but he's definitely not a centaur. Read more of his reviews here.
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33 Items found Print
Active Filters: Authors, Playrights & Poets
26 Fairmont Avenue
by Tomie De Paola
from Puffin Books
for 2nd-5th grade
in Picture Books (Location: PICTURE)
$6.99 $4.00 (1 in stock)
Agatha Christie: An Autobiography
by Agatha Christie
2012 Reissue from William Morrow & Company
for 11th-Adult
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton
by G. K. Chesterton
from Ignatius Press
Autobiography for 10th-Adult
in 20th & 21st Century Literature (Location: LIT7-20)
$18.95
Black Boy (American Hunger)
by Richard Wright, Foreword by John Edgar Wideman, Afterworld by Malcolm Wright
Modern Classics 75th Anniversary from Harper Perennial
for Adult
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
Blue Remembered Hills
by Rosemary Sutcliff
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
for 6th-10th grade
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
Blue Remembered Hills
by Rosemary Sutcliff
from William Morrow & Company
for 6th-10th grade
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank
from Bantam Books
Biography for 7th-Adult
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$8.99
Education of a Wandering Man
by Louis L'amour
from Bantam Books
for 10th-Adult
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$8.99
Girl From Yamhill
by Beverly Cleary
from HarperCollins
for 3rd-7th grade
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$12.99
Grief Observed
by C. S. Lewis, with a foreword by Madeleine L'Engle
from HarperCollins
Death/Grief for 10th-Adult
in 20th & 21st Century Literature (Location: LIT7-20)
$17.99
Helen Keller: The Story of My Life
Signet Classics
by Helen Keller
Reprint from Signet Classics
Autobiography for 7th-10th grade
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$5.95
Helen Keller: The Story of My Life
Signet Classics
by Helen Keller
from Living Book Press
Autobiography for 7th-10th grade
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$15.99
Homesick: My Own Story
by Jean Fritz
from Penguin Putnam
for 4th-8th grade
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$6.00 (1 in stock)
In Search of History
by Theodore H. White
from Harper & Row
for Adult
in History for Adults (Location: ADU-HIS)
$7.00 (1 in stock)
Lost Garden
by Laurence Yep
from Simon and Schuster
Autobiography for 6th-9th grade
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$3.00 (1 in stock)
Milton Meltzer
by Milton Meltzer
from Franklin Watts
for 8th-Adult
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$8.00 (1 in stock)
Moon & I
by Betsy Byars
from Beech Tree Books
for 5th-8th grade
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$3.50 (2 in stock)
My Heart Lies South
by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño
Young People's Edition from Bethlehem Books
Biography for 8th-12th grade
in Historical Fiction (Location: FIC-HIF)
$14.95 $10.00 (1 in stock)
My Heart Lies South
by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño
from Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
Biography for 10th-Adult
in Vintage Fiction & Literature (Location: VIN-FIC)
Ordinary Hazards
by Nikki Grimes
from Wordsong
for 10th-Adult
2020 Robert F. Siebert Honor Book
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$19.99
Prairie Town Boy
by Carl Sandburg, illustrated by Joe Krush
from Harcourt
Autobiography for 5th-8th grade
in Realistic Fiction (Location: FIC-REA)
$4.00 (1 in stock)
Present Indicative
by Noel Coward
from Doubleday, Doran & Company Inc.
for Adult
in Vintage History & Biographies (Location: VIN-HIS)
$6.00 (1 in stock)
Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio
by Peg Kehret
from Albert Whitman & Company
for 4th-6th grade
in Clearance: Biographies (Location: ZCLE-BIO)
Surprised by Joy
by C. S. Lewis
from Harcourt
Autobiography for 9th-Adult
in 20th & 21st Century Literature (Location: LIT7-20)
$6.50 (1 in stock)
Surprised by Joy
by C. S. Lewis
Reissue from HarperOne
Autobiography for 9th-Adult
in 20th & 21st Century Literature (Location: LIT7-20)
$16.99
Surprised by Joy
by C. S. Lewis
from Harcourt
Autobiography for 9th-Adult
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$12.00 (1 in stock)
Ugly: A Memoir
by Robert Hoge
from Puffin Books
for 3rd-6th grade
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$8.99
Up From Slavery
Penguin Classics
by Booker T. Washington
from Penguin Classics
Autobiography for 10th-Adult
in 20th & 21st Century Literature (Location: LIT7-20)
$12.00
Up From Slavery
Penguin Classics
by Booker T. Washington
from Signet Classics
Autobiography for 10th-Adult
in 20th & 21st Century Literature (Location: LIT7-20)
$5.95
Up From Slavery
Good and the Beautiful Library Level 10
by Booker T. Washington, with grammar and spelling updated by Jenny Phillips
from The Good and the Beautiful
Autobiography for 10th-Adult
in GATB Language Arts & Reading (Location: CUR-GABELA)
$5.00 (1 in stock)
Up From Slavery
by Booker T. Washington
from Gramercy Books
Autobiography for 10th-Adult
in 20th & 21st Century Literature (Location: LIT7-20)
Up From Slavery
Copper Lodge Library
by Booker T. Washington, annotated by Stephanie B. Meter
from Classical Conversations
Autobiography for 9th-Adult
in 20th & 21st Century Literature (Location: LIT7-20)
$11.95 $8.50 (1 in stock)
Yoshiko Uchida
by Yoshiko Uchida
from Julian Messner
for 3rd-8th grade
in Biographies (Location: BIO)
$6.00 (1 in stock)