Memoir, Biography, & Autobiography

Best known by her stage name, La Goulue (the Glutton), Louise Weber was one of the biggest stars of fin de siècle Paris, renowned as a cancan dancer at the Moulin Rouge. The subject of numerous paintings and photographs, she became an iconic figure of modern art. Her life, however, has consistently... More

When interviewed by the Charlottesville, Virginia, Ridge Street Oral History Project, which documented the lives of Black residents in the 1990s, Mable Jones described herself as a children’s nurse, recounting her employment in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson,... More

Would it surprise you to learn that there was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway’s who, in his romantic questing and hell-or-high-water pursuit of life and his art, was closer to the Hemingwayesque ideal than Hemingway himself? Almost Hemingway relates the life of Negley Farson, adventurer,... More

A celebrated historian and women’s studies scholar, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese roiled both disciplines with her transition from Marxist-inclined feminist to conservative public intellectual. In the first major biography of this singular and controversial scholar, Deborah Symonds explores Fox-Genovese’s... More

In December 1967, Chuck Robb was catapulted onto the national scene when he married Lynda Bird Johnson, the daughter of President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a nationally broadcast White House wedding. Shortly thereafter, Robb, a U.S. Marine, deployed to Vietnam, where he commanded India Company of the... More

The daughter of Haitian journalist and pro-democracy activist Jean Léopold Dominique, who was assassinated in 2000, Jan J. Dominique offers a memoir that provides a uniquely personal perspective on the tumultuous end of the twentieth century in Haiti. Wandering Memory is her elegy for a father and... More

By the end of volume 1 of The Life of William Faulkner ("A filling, satisfying feast for Faulkner aficianados"— Kirkus), the young Faulkner had gone from an unpromising, self-mythologizing bohemian to the author of some of the most innovative and enduring literature of the century, including The... More

In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell.Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories... More

Imagine setting out on a road trip in a 1929 Ford Model A Roadster, with the stated goal of traveling from Manhattan to Mexico and Central America, after only a week’s worth of preparation. This is exactly what brothers Arthur Lyon and Joe Lyon Jr. did on March 23, 1930. The Lyons acquired some... More

Jane Tompkins, a renowned literature professor and award-winning author, thought she knew what reading was until, struck by a debilitating illness, she finds herself reading day and night because it is all she can do. A lifelong lover of books, she realizes for the first time that if you pay close... More

Jeffrey Meyers’ Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy brings to life a set of extraordinary writers, painters, and literary adventurers who turned their lives into art. Meyers knew nine of these figures, in some cases intimately, while five others he admires and regrets never meeting. As he... More

From Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Marcel Proust, from Marguerite Duras to George Sand, from Colette to Patrick Modiano, gardens appear in novels as representations of the real world, but also as reflections of the imagination. In Paper Gardens: A Stroll through French Literature, Évelyne Bloch-Dano... More

With Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters, James Diedrick offers a groundbreaking critical biography of the German-born British poet Mathilde Blind (1841–1896), a freethinking radical feminist. Born to politically radical parents, Blind had, by the time she was thirty,... More

Robert Frost observed in his wife, Elinor, a desire to live "a life that goes rather poetically." The same could be said of many members of the Frost family, over several generations. In You Come Too, Frost’s granddaughter, Lesley Lee Francis, combines priceless personal memories and rigorous... More

Melissa Walker set out on a journey that many women of her generation have mapped only in their dreams. Like many American chroniclers before her who have surrendered to the aimless pleasures of the road, Walker had no geographical destination in mind, but she did have two definite goals—one... More

A riveting collection of thirty-eight narratives by American soldiers serving in Afghanistan, Outside the Wire offers a powerful evocation of everyday life in a war zone. Christine Dumaine Leche—a writing instructor who left her home and family to teach at Bagram Air Base and a forward operating... More

Although his career continued for almost three decades after the 1939 publication of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck is still most closely associated with his Depression-era works of social struggle. But from Pearl Harbor on, he often wrote passionate accounts of America’s wars based on his own... More

He survived a turbulent childhood in war-torn London, earned degrees with honors from Cambridge University, was ordained in the Church of England, became an Anglican worker-priest, and emigrated to the United States.He has been a prolific broadcaster for the BBC, helped organize the Public... More

After a childhood divided between America and Europe, Henry James settled with his family in New England, first in what he regarded as an outpost of Europe, Newport, and later in Cambridge. The family letters (the initial inspiration for this autobiographical enterprise), many of which recount the... More

Henry James was the final survivor of a remarkable family, and his memoir, written at the end of a long and tireless career, was prompted initially by the death of his "ideal Elder Brother," the psychologist and philosopher William James. A Small Boy and Others recounts the novelist’s earliest... More

Early in Nature Cure Richard Mabey returns continually to the swift, who in its spectacular migration may not touch down for well over a year. In Ted Hughes’s phrase, the reappearance of the swifts tells us that "the globe’s still working." When we encounter the author in the opening pages of this... More

The daughter of medical missionaries, Elaine Neil Orr was born in Nigeria in 1954, in the midst of the national movement that would lead to independence from Great Britain. But as she tells it in her captivating new memoir, Orr did not grow up as a stranger abroad; she was a girl at home—only half... More

The novels of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ellen Glasgow ushered the South into the modern era, rejecting the typically romanticized approach for a cunningly observed realism. Glasgow’s originality of mind and abiding fascination with her native South are in abundant display in this new selection... More

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) has come to be considered one of the major poets--not just one of the major women poets—of the Victorian era, eclipsing her famous brother. Leading critics have demonstrated how studies of Rossetti’s work, her daily life, her relationships with the Pre-Raphaelites,... More

This twelfth and final volume of The Correspondence of William James concludes the series of William James’s correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues that began with volume 4. The first three volumes were devoted to the letters exchanged between the brothers William and Henry James.... More