Books like One Writer's Beginnings
Welty's Harvard lectures on growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, on her parents and her reading, and on the habits of listening and watching that made her a writer.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of One Writer's Beginnings
The Dark Child
Camara Laye remembers growing up in Kouroussa in French Guinea, the son of a goldsmith with magical gifts, until he leaves for school in Conakry and then for Paris.
Aké: The Years of Childhood
Soyinka's memoir of growing up in a parsonage compound in Abeokuta in western Nigeria in the 1930s and 40s, up to the age of eleven.
Delta Wedding
A Delta plantation family gathers for a daughter's wedding in 1923, and every cousin, aunt, and uncle crowds in.
Black Boy
Richard Wright's memoir of growing up hungry and defiant in the Jim Crow South, in Mississippi, Arkansas and Memphis, and of the books that convinced him there was a way out.
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.
The Optimist's Daughter
A woman returns to Mississippi after her father's death and has to contend with his young second wife and her own memories of home.
Speak, Memory
Nabokov remembers his St. Petersburg childhood and émigré youth, from butterfly summers on the family estate to Cambridge and Berlin, in prose built like a chess problem.
The Tongue Set Free
Canetti remembers his childhood from 1905 to 1921, in a Sephardic Jewish family in Bulgaria, Manchester, Vienna and Zurich, and the mother who taught him German.
Bird by Bird
Lamott's guide to writing and the writing life, built on permission to write terrible first drafts and the advice her father once gave her brother, stuck on a school report about birds: take it bird by bird.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Angelou's Stamps, Arkansas childhood under Jim Crow, the pastor-grandmother's store, the trauma that silenced her, and the teacher who taught her back into language.
The Liars' Club
Mary Karr's childhood in an East Texas oil town with a storytelling, hard-drinking father and an unstable mother, the memoir that helped start a wave of confessional writing.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Murakami reflects on decades of long-distance running and what the discipline has taught him about writing, ageing, and pain.