So Twain lit out for the territory with Orion. The book tells the story of that journey, of his years as a freelance writer and newspaperman in Nevada and California, of the many colorful characters and locales he encountered, and finally his 1866 journey to Hawaii (then known as the Sandwich Islands). The autobiographical details, of course, are

The case of Rigoberta Menchú played out for higher stakes. Menchú is a Guatemalan Indian activist whose father, mother, and two brothers all died at the hands of government security forces between 1979 and 1983. Her autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchú, was published in 1983 and rapidly became a canonical text among students and scholars of

The biggest bestseller of 1942—and one of the biggest of all time, with some 2,786,000 copies sold—was See Here, Private Hargrove, by Marion Hargrove, a lighthearted romp through basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia. (The journal Books praised it as “a contribution to the lighter side of war.”) The

the city exulting.” Pius’s profession notwithstanding, the Commentaries don’t properly belong to the tradition of religious autobiography; rather, they are a product of Renaissance humanism and the mirror it held up to the self. (The development of glass mirrors at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries has been cited as

That combination—memory like Swiss cheese, arrogant confidence in its integrity—seems to be a human trait, and is certainly reflected in most autobiographies (Rousseau’s humility is exceptional), which do not grant even the possibility that the chronicle they offer—including the word-for-word transcription of conversations held half a century

At least four principles embodied in the book are so commonplace among contemporary memoirists as to go without saying, but were revolutionary at the time: a belief in total frankness and honesty; an emphasis on the inner life of the mind and emotions rather than on the external one of action; a significant attention to childhood and youth; and a

Unfortunately, this came too late to prevent the damage done by Michelle Remembers, which was taken seriously for years in academic, medical, and legal circles. In 1981, Lawrence Pazder presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, where he coined the term “ritual abuse.” In 1984, he and Michelle Smith went to Los

The pendulum swings once a memoir experiences success in the marketplace. The more it sells, the more parties emerge with an interest in exposing inaccuracies: journalists; bloggers; injured parties; political, personal, or business enemies or rivals. The higher the stakes—if the book’s “facts” are in support of charged political issues (as with

Probably the oldest post-Augustine memoirs date from the twelfth century and were written by French monks. One of them, Peter Abelard’s Historia calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), remains a compelling cautionary tale and, in its depiction of mental and physical hurt, anticipates today’s misery memoirs. It is addressed to an unnamed