BiblioVault - Books about Autobiography

Western Subjects

Autobiographical Writing In North American West

Gioia Woods

University of Utah Press, 2005

When “I” Was Born

Women’s Autobiography in Modern China

Jing M. Wang

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

In the period between the 1920s and 1940s, a genre emerged in Chinese literature that would reveal crucial contradictions in Chinese culture that still exist today. At a time of intense political conflict, Chinese women began to write autobiography, a genre that focused on personal identity and self-exploration rather than the national, collective identity that the country was championing.

When “I” Was Born: Women’s Autobiography in Modern China reclaims the voices of these particular writers, voices that have been misinterpreted and overlooked for decades. Tracing women writers as they move from autobiographical fiction, often self-revelatory and personal, to explicit autobiographies that focused on women’s roles in public life, Jing M. Wang reveals the factors that propelled this literary movement, the roles that liberal translators and their renditions of Western life stories played, and the way in which these women writers redefined writing and gender in the stories they told. But Wang reveals another story as well: the evolving history and identity of women in modern Chinese society. When “I” Was Born adds to a growing body of important work in Chinese history and culture, women’s studies, and autobiography in a global context.

Writers discussed include Xie Bingying, Zhang Ailing, Yu Yinzi, Fei Pu, Lu Meiyen, Feng Heyi, Ye Qian, Bai Wei, Shi Wen, Fan Xiulin, Su Xuelin, and Lu Yin.

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Where the Evidence Leads

An Autobiography, Revised and Updated

Dick Thornburgh

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

Set in any era, Dick Thornburgh’s brilliant career would merit study and retelling. He was the first Republican elected to two successive terms as governor of Pennsylvania. He served in the Department of Justice under five presidents, including three years as attorney general for Presidents Reagan and Bush. As undersecretary-
general of the United Nations, he was the highest-ranking American in the organization and a strong voice for reform.

Nationally, Thornburgh is best remembered for his three years as attorney general, when he managed some of the most vexing legal matters of the modern age: the Savings and Loan and BCCI scandals; controversy over the “Iraqgate” and INSLAW investigations and the Wichita abortion clinic protests; and prosecutions of Michael Milken, Manuel Noriega, and Marion Barry, as well as those involved in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the Rodney King beating.

As governor of Pennsylvania, he faced the nation’s worst nuclear accident, weeks after his inauguration in 1979. Thornburgh's cool-headed response to the Three Mile Island disaster is often studied as a textbook example of emergency management. His historic 1992 battle against Harris Wofford for the late John Heinz III’s Senate seat is one of several political campaigns, vividly recalled, that reveal the inner workings of the commonwealth’s political machinery.

Thornburgh reveals painful details of his personal life, including the automobile accident that claimed the life of his first wife and permanently disabled his infant son. He presents a frank analysis of the challenges of raising a family as a public figure, and tells the moving story of his personal and political crusade that culminated in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

This revised and updated edition includes a new chapter devoted to the highlights of Thornburgh’s continuing career. He offers fascinating insights into his experiences as Bankruptcy Court Examiner for the WorldCom proceedings, leading the investigation into the CBS News report on President George W. Bush’s military service record, representing Allegheny County coroner Cyril Wecht in a trial over alleged misuse of public office, and as part of the K&L Gates team consulted by Chiquita Brands during a federal investigation over payments made to Colombian guerillas and paramilitaries to protect banana growers.

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Whisper Not

The Autobiography of Benny Golson

Benny Golson

Temple University Press, 2016

“One of the greatest artists our country has is Benny Golson. He is not only a great musician, but an original and fabulous composer. He is inventive and creative and his work is loved the world over. Benny is a rare, creative genius. All I would like to say is THREE CHEERS for Benny Golson!”—Tony Bennett

“Composer supreme, tenor man supreme, jazz man supreme, good guy supreme: that’s BENNY GOLSON!"—Sonny Rollins

Born during the de facto inaugural era of jazz, saxophonist Benny Golson learned his instrument and the vocabulary of jazz alongside John Coltrane while Golson was still in high school in Philadelphia. Quickly establishing himself as an iconic fixture on the jazz landscape, Golson performed with dozens of jazz greats, from Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, and Jimmy Heath to Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard, and many others. An acclaimed composer, Golson also wrote music for Hollywood films and television and composed such memorable jazz standards as “Stablemates,” “Killer Joe,” and “Whisper Not.”

An eloquent account of Golson’s exceptional life—presented episodically rather than chronologically—Whisper Not includes a dazzling collection of anecdotes, memories, experiences, and photographs that recount the successes, the inevitable failures, and the rewards of a life eternally dedicated to jazz.

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Who Am I?

An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit

Yi-Fu Tuan

University of Wisconsin Press

Who Am I? is the bittersweet memoir of a Chinese American who came to this country as a twenty-year-old graduate student and stayed to become one of America’s most innovative intellectuals, whose work has explored the aesthetic and moral dimensions of human relations with landscape, nature, and environment. This unusually introspective autobiography mixes Yi-Fu Tuan’s reflections on a life filled with recognition, accolades, and affection with what he deems moral failings, his lack of courage—including the courage to be open about his homosexuality.

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William Watts Folwell

The Autobiography and Letters of a Pioneer of Culture

William Folwell

University of Minnesota Press, 1933

William Watts Folwell: The Autobiography and Letters of a Pioneer Culture was first published in 1933. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original In a three-room farmhouse in Romulus, New York, where a spinning wheel stood by the fireplace and home-dipped candles lighted the long evenings, William Watts Folwell was born on February 14, 1833. His life of ninety-six years spanned the Century of Progress. It was on February 14, 1933, exactly one hundred years from the day of his birth, that the University of Minnesota Press brought out this volume containing Dr. Folwell’s own story of his long life. He traveled in early Victorian Europe, met Browning in Italy and Jakob Grimm in Germany, corresponded with Matthew Arnold, served as an officer in the Civil War, and in 1869 became the first president of the University of Minnesota. From that time until his death in September 1929, he maintained an unflagging interest in the affairs of the university and the state, finishing the four-volume History of Minnesota only a few months before his death.

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Witnessing Slavery

The Development Of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives

Frances Smith Foster

University of Wisconsin Press, 1994

Frances Foster's classic study of pre-Civil War American slave autobiography is now issued in an accessible paperback edition. The first book to represent these slave narratives as literary in the complete sense of the word, and the first study to call attention to the significance of gender in the narratives, Witnessing Slavery will be welcomed by both general readers and students of the American south, slavery, the Civil War, and race issues.

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Woman at Work

The Autobiography of Mary Anderson as told to Mary N. Winslow

Mary Anderson

University of Minnesota Press, 1951

Woman at Work was first published in 1951. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This is the story of a remarkable woman whose life has been devoted to the betterment of working conditions for women. Mary Anderson was director of the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor for twenty-five years, from shortly after its inception until her retirement in 1944. Her autobiography encompasses almost every movement in this country, and international efforts as well, for the benefit of women workers.In her own simple diction, as told to Mary Winslow, who was associated in many of the same movements, Miss Anderson reveals an almost incredible life story. She recounts her arrival in America as a Swedish immigrant of sixteen and her early years as domestic worker, exploited factory hand, and trade union organizer. She describes her bitter struggles for unionization of the garment, shoe, and other industries in Chicago, and the activities of the Chicago and National Women’s Trade Union leagues in helping factory and mine workers gain a start toward living wages, shorter hours, and safer working conditions. She tells, finally, of a quarter-century of federal service – setting standards for women’s employment during two world wars, and serving the cause of labor effectively under five presidents. As the first U.S. government representative to the International Labor Organization, Miss Anderson championed principles of equality for women that were subsequently embodied in the United Nations Charter.Through the story there are sidelights and appraisals of such notables as Frances Perkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John L. Lewis, and many others. It is an absorbing book, and one that documents an important aspect of our country’s social development.

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Women, Autobiography, Theory

A Reader

Edited by Sidonie A. Smith and Julia Watson

University of Wisconsin Press, 1998

    Women, Autobiography, Theory is the first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women’s autobiography, drawing into one volume the most significant theoretical discussions on women’s life writing of the last two decades.
    The authoritative introduction by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson surveys writing about women’s lives from the women’s movement of the late 1960s to the present. It also relates theoretical positions in women’s autobiography studies to postmodern, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist analyses.
    The essays from thirty-nine prominent critics and writers include many considered classics in this field. They explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe, including testimonios, diaries, memoirs, letters, trauma accounts, prison narratives, coming-out stories, coming-of-age stories, and spiritual autobiographies. A list of more than two hundred women’s autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography of critical scholarship in women’s autobiography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.

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Women's Life-Writing

Finding Voice, Building Community

Linda S. Coleman

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

These essays offer readers vivid and varied evidence of the female response to recurring attempts by culture to artificially limit identity along the gendered lines of private and public experience. Calling on voices both familiar and little known, British and American, black and white, young and old, the essayists explore how women used life-writing as a means of both self-understanding and connection to a community of sympathetic others, real or imagined.

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Words of Witness

Black Women's Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era

Angela A. Ards

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

A literary and political genealogy of the last half-century, Words of Witness explores black feminist autobiographical narratives in the context of activism and history since the landmark 1954 segregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. Angela A. Ards examines how activist writers, especially five whose memoirs were published in the 1990s and 2000s, crafted these life stories to engage and shape progressive, post-Brown politics.
Exploring works by the critically acclaimed June Jordan and Edwidge Danticat, as well as by popular and emerging authors such as Melba Beals, Rosemary Bray, and Eisa Davis, Ards demonstrates how each text asserts countermemories to official—and often nostalgic—understandings of the civil rights and Black Power movements. She situates each writer as activist-citizen, adopting and remaking particular roles—warrior, “the least of these,” immigrant, hip-hop head—to crystallize a range of black feminist responses to urgent but unresolved political issues.

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Writing Desire

Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography

Bertram J. Cohler

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

     Exploring nearly sixty years of memoir and autobiography, Writing Desire examines the changing identity of gay men writing within a historical context. Distinguished scholar and psychoanalyst Bertram J. Cohler has carefully selected a diverse group of ten men, including historians, activists, journalists, poets, performance artists, and bloggers, whose life writing evokes the evolution of gay life in twentieth-century America.
     By contrasting the personal experience of these disparate writers, Cohler illustrates the social transformations that these men helped shape. Among Cohler's diverse subjects is Alan Helms, whose journey from Indiana to New York's gay society represents the passage of men who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, when homosexuality was considered a hidden "disease." The liberating effects of Stonewall's aftermath are chronicled in the life of Arnie Kantrowitz, the prototypical activist for gay rights in the 1970s and the founder the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation. The artistic works of Tim Miller and Mark Doty evoke loss and shock during of the early stages of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Cohler rounds out this collective group portrait by looking at the newest generation of writers in the Internet age via the blog of BrYaN, who did the previously unthinkable: he "outed" himself to millions of people.
     A compelling mix of social history and personal biography, Writing Desire distills the experience of three generations of gay America.

Finalist, LGBT Studies, Lambda Literary Foundation

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Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century

Tanya M. Caldwell

Bucknell University Press, 2020

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognized male and female figures—returning to the Boswell and Burney circle—but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes. The contributors reconsider the processes of hero making in the beginning phases of a culture of celebrity. Employing the methodology William Godwin outlined for novelists of taking material “from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs,” each contributor examines within the contexts of their time and historical traditions the anxieties and imperatives of the auto/biographer as she or he shapes material into a legacy. New work on Frances Burney D’Arblay’s son, Alexander, as revealed through letters; on Isabelle de Charriere; on Hester Thrale Piozzi; and on Alicia LeFanu and Frances Burney’s realignment of family biography extend current conversations about eighteenth century biography and autobiography.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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Writing the Lost Generation

Expatriate Autobiography and American Modernism

Craig Monk

University of Iowa Press, 2008

Members of the Lost Generation, American writers and artists who lived in Paris during the 1920s, continue to occupy an important place in our literary history. Rebelling against increased commercialism and the ebb of cosmopolitan society in early twentieth-century America, they rejected the culture of what Ernest Hemingway called a place of “broad lawns and narrow minds.”
Much of what we know about these iconic literary figures comes from their own published letters and essays, revealing how adroitly they developed their own reputations by controlling the reception of their work. Surprisingly the literary world has paid less attention to their autobiographies.
In Writing the Lost Generation, Craig Monk unlocks a series of neglected texts while reinvigorating our reading of more familiar ones. Well-known autobiographies by Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein are joined here by works from a variety of lesser-known—but still important—expatriate American writers, including Sylvia Beach, Alfred Kreymborg, Samuel Putnam, and Harold Stearns. By bringing together the self-reflective works of the Lost Generation and probing the ways the writers portrayed themselves, Monk provides an exciting and comprehensive overview of modernist expatriates from the United States.

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Writing the Pioneer Woman

Janet Floyd

University of Missouri Press, 2002

Focusing on a series of autobiographical texts, published and private, well known and obscure, Writing the Pioneer Woman examines the writing of domestic life on the nineteenth-century North American frontier. In an attempt to determine the meanings found in the pioneer woman's everyday writings—from records of recipes to descriptions of washing floors—Janet Floyd explores domestic details in the autobiographical writing of British and Anglo-American female emigrants.

Floyd argues that the figure of the pioneer housewife has been a significant one within general cultural debates about the home and the domestic life of women, on both sides of the Atlantic. She looks at the varied ideological work performed by this figure over the last 150 years and at what the pioneer woman signifies and has signified in national cultural debates concerning womanhood and home.

The autobiographies under discussion are not only of homemaking but also of emigration. Equally, these texts are about the enterprise of emigration, with several of them written to advise prospective emigrants. Using the insights of diaspora and migration theory, Floyd shows that these writings portray a far subtler role for the pioneer woman than is suggested by previous scholars, who often see her either as participating directly in the overall domestication of colonial space or as being strictly marginal to that process.

Written in response to the highly critical discussion of the attitudes and activities of female "civilizers" within "New" Western history and postcolonial studies, Writing the Pioneer Woman will be a valuable addition to the burgeoning discussion of the literature of domesticity.

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