Best Autobiography

[mal4mac]

I liked the Autobiography of J.S. Mill. He's not the self-aggrandising sort, but knows his own merits, so he avoids the pitfalls you mention. If you like that, try "Father & Son" by Edmund Gosse. It had a very similar feel to it, and his father was even more interesting than Mill's

[kev67]

Auto da Fey by Fay Weldon is probably the best autobiography I have read.

I have not read many autobiographies, but it is sometimes interesting what they put in and what they leave out. I also find it interesting when they give themselves away without seeming to realise it. The book I am thinking of most here is Looking for Trouble by Sir General de la Billiere.

[wordeater]

I haven't read many, but I liked Agatha Christie's autobiography. Charlie Chaplin also wrote a good one.

[Pierre Menard]

Speak, Memory by Nabokov is beautiful. Trademark lyrical prose with that wonderful Nabokov wit that penetrates of all of life's tragedies and sublimity.

[ennison]

Wandering about on a late-night loose end I came on this and realised my favourite book could be described as autobiographical: Uttermost Part of the Earth. But it is so much more than just a life story .

[chrisvia]

I'll regurgitate a lot of the posts:

Confessions, Augustine
Speak, Memory, Nabokov
A Portrait of thew Artist as a Young Man, Joyce
A Moveable Feast, Hemingway

[Ughek]

Like several people here I really liked Malcolm X's 'autobiography'. I've also read Václav Havel's authorized biography, which was also very good, although it was poorly translated.

[Little Gal]

What's the best autobiography you've ever read? I ask because I find it so difficult to find autobiographies that I enjoy, so much so that I've just about given up on autobiographies alltogether. I think that the problem lies in the form itself - a very difficult kind of book to write; so difficult not to be either too easy or too hard on yourself, too self-aggrandizing or too self-debasing, too narcissistic or too removed, too difficult to find the right balance between those polarities. So please, in your answer mention why you like it. How was the author able to make it work?

For me the best autobiography is far and away Malcolm Muggeridge's two-volume "Chronicles of Wasted Time".

I came across a wonderful autobiography, R.K. Narayan's ' My Days'... I took it up out of my strong inclination towards this particular form of writing and I feel in its brilliant simplicity, the sort of ' right balance', amply. You will be surprised with the ease of it. It goes on unfurling like life as we live and see it, you are able relate directly, and it leaves you hungering for more...

[ennison]

A Voice Through a Cloud by Denton Welch is a book I would recommend. There are other books which are partly autobiographical. Many travel book are more about the traveller than the places. I enjoyed Frank Fraser Darling's various books about his years of peripatetic wanderings in the Highlands. They are books by a naturalist but his own rather eccentric personality comes through strongly and probably unintentionally. The same could be said for some of Gavin Maxwell's books.