Books like Autobiographies
Yeats's own account of his childhood in Sligo and London, his youth among the artists and occultists of the 1890s, and the Irish literary revival.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Autobiographies
Native Realm
Miłosz's autobiography of his education, from a childhood in Lithuania through the war in Warsaw to his defection, as a search for a European identity.
The Celtic Twilight
Yeats's gathering of the fairy lore, ghost stories and visionary encounters he heard from country people in Sligo and Galway.
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
The full arc of Yeats's work, from Celtic twilight dreaming to the fierce, stripped late poems wrestling with age, Ireland, and the turning gyres of history.
An Angel at My Table
Janet Frame's autobiography, from a poor childhood in Oamaru through eight years in mental hospitals to her escape into writing and to Europe.
Less Than One
Brodsky's essays on growing up in postwar Leningrad, on his parents, and on the poets he loved, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Auden and Cavafy among them.
The Words
Sartre's account of his childhood to the age of eleven in his grandfather's Paris apartment, among books, and how he decided to become a writer.
Novelist as a Vocation
Essays on how Murakami became a novelist, from the baseball game where he decided to write his first book to the daily routine and stubbornness that have kept him writing since.
Irish Journal
Böll's sketches of Ireland in the 1950s, from a stay on Achill Island: rain, pubs, priests, emigration and the people who stayed.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi, a literature professor forced out of her university in the Islamic Republic, gathers seven of her best women students at her house every Thursday to read forbidden Western novels.
Istanbul: Memories and the City
Pamuk's memoir of growing up in Istanbul in the 1950s and 60s, of his family, and of the melancholy of the city, which Turks call hüzün.
Living to Tell the Tale
The first volume of García Márquez's memoirs, from his childhood in his grandparents' house in Aracataca to his years as a young journalist in Cartagena and Barranquilla, up to 1955.
M Train
Patti Smith writes from her Greenwich Village café over black coffee, mapping what she has lost and loved: her late husband Fred, pilgrimages to writers' graves and the Continental Drift Club she belongs to.