Best Autobiography

[Victoria2133]

I agree with Idril - A Heartbreaking Work is wonderful. Really depressing, but funny at the same time. So you feel terrible for laughing. It kind of confuses your reactions...

I'd also suggest Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama - though some may argue that you'd have to support him to appreciate what he has to say. I don't necessarily believe that.

And I know it's old-school, but the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is a good read. I read it a few months ago and I was struck by how we're told in elementary school that he's a hero, but then we read his autobiography in college and we begin to think he was a bad person. I reread it again in grad school a few years later and came away with the impression that he was just a normal man with a very sophisticated idea of public identity. Maybe it's just me, but I think he had a few things figured out.

[WICKES]

For me it would be Moab is my Washpot, by the brilliant Stephen Fry. His writing is so funny and overall excellent. Known for his way with words and his vast knowledge, the story of his life, carear, and family is a must for Fry fans..

It is a brilliant book isn't it! I think it is the best thing he has ever done- you don't need to be a Fry fan to enjoy it

[EricP]

I would recommend Jean-Paul Sartre's "Words", Richard Wright's "Black Boy", Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, Nabokov's "Speak, Memory", and Emma Goldman's "Living My Life".

[ex ponto]

My recommendations: Knut Hamsun's ''On Overgrown Paths'' - a Norwegian Nobel Prize winner, accused of collaborating with Nazies during the WW II. Interesting, funny and sad lines of nearly deaf, intelligent old man.

''My Inventions'' by Nikola Tesla. You can skipp the technical parts, but the first half of the book, of his childhood and youth, is brilliant. Very, very unusual man!

[Kafka's Crow]

I nominate John Cowper Powys' "Autobiography" hands down, but have never met anyone else who's read it.

You will not meet anybody who has read it! I have read more than half of A Glastonbury Romance and am planning to finish it and start reading Wolf Solent as a brand new copy sits on my bookshelf. Will look at the Autobiography. Should be interesting. Great writer indeed.

[Inderjit Sanghe]

Nabokov's 'Speak, Memory' stands out.

[RichardHresko]

No list of autobiographies could be complete without Augustine's 'Confessions.' A remarkable work on many levels.

[EricP]

No list of autobiographies could be complete without Augustine's 'Confessions.' A remarkable work on many levels.

I would add Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions" as well.

[DooRag]

Bob Dylan's Autobiography "Chronicles: Vol.1" is a really cool read. Unlike any other autobiog I have ever read. (although I'm sure he made large parts of it up)

[stlukesguild]

There are several strong autobiographies that I have read including Augustine's Confessions, Cellini's Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Franklin's Autobiography of Benjamen Franklin, and Henry Adam's The Education of Henry Adams... and we might add Boswell's Journal's... but by far my favorites are Rousseau's Confessions and DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

[WICKES]

DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

yes, that is very good- I'd forgotten that one

[carlin08]

I have always been interested in the nonfiction genre and I'm very intrigued with this tread, especially because there seems to be so many ways to define the term "autobiography."

When someone says that they don't like to read autobiographies, I wonder what their assumptions are about the genre. For instance, if you say you don't enjoy reading autobiographies, does this include memoirs? Is autobiography and memoir even the same thing? The recommendations of "good autobiographies" that you have all given here are so different, and its hard to image that some of these texts even fall into the same category. For instance, how can one consider _A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_ and _The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin_, or Augustine's _Confessions_, to be in the same category? Arguably, someone who reads Augustine's text is holding different expectations and assumptions about autobiographical writing than someone who reads Egger's memoir.

So I guess this leads me to the very general question: What do you expect from works of nonfiction (specifically autobiographies/memoirs)? Is it simply any text that does not engage in fictitious writing? Or is it more complex than this?

My recommendations:
_Borrowed Time_ Paul Monette (a beautiful writer)
_A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_ Dave Eggers
_Blackbird_ Jennifer Lauck
_All Souls_ Michael Patrick McDonald
_Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir_ Lauren Slater
_An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War the Came Between Us_ James Carroll
_Girl Interrupted_ Susanna Kaysen

And two graphic novels:
_Fun Home_ Allison Bechdel (This is an amazing book).
_Blankets_ Craig Thompson

[dfloyd]

When I was a young man in the 60s, I read the Autobiography of Franklin and Benvenuto Cellini. Also, the Travels of Marco Polo and Caesar's Gallic Wars. These are informative books which give a perspective on times other than our own.

[DanielBenoit]

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers isn't the greatest biography I've ever read, but is certainly one of the most creative and funniest.

[mal4mac]

"The Autobiography of J.S. Mill". Mill is that rare thing, a readable philosopher :-) And his life was interesting and weird. His father was a leading intellectual who had him learning Greek as a toddler. You get an account of his interactions with the leading Utilitarians and other thinkers of the day, and also of his nervous breakdown - caused by too much Greek and Utilitarianism. He recovered by reading Wordsworth and other Romantic poets. Somehow, he also found time to have a real job, with the East India Company - a fascinating Victorian mega-corporation that makes Enron look like the corner store...

"Father and Son" - Edmund Gosse. Edmund's father was the inventor of the aquarium, one of Darwin's main field workers, *and* a leader of the extreme Christian sect "The Plymouth Brethren". He hot-housed his son, making him a Church Father before he was a teenager *and* training him to be a marine biologist. Superb personal account of the first round of "Darwin v. The Church" played out as an internal conflict within both Father and Son. Also has a really poignant account of his mother's death from breast cancer.

Neither author is "too self-aggrandizing or too self-debasing, too narcissistic or too removed." They both had very interesting fathers and got to know leading figures through close association, which gave them a lot of interesting things to write about beside themselves. Their upbringings (one Utilitarian, one Christian both Victorian!) probably helped keep them from becoming "full of themselves".

Bertrand Russell's "Autobiography" was also pretty interesting, though his more philosophical autobiography "My Philosophical Development" was better. Modern autobiographies I liked:

Bryan Magee - "Confessions of a Philosopher"
Karen Armstrong - "The Spiral Staircase"