As I have mentioned I’ll be soon teaching an elective subject on autobiographies and memoirs (in English). In preparation, I’ve been putting together a list of 100 remarkable pre-21st century texts in those genres, apart from the list of 21st century books my students need to read (each student chooses four from this list). This type of list is useful but hard to find, so I’m sharing the results of my work. Out of these, I should be commenting in class on about 50. As you may imagine, any selection is just the tip of the iceberg of two genres that have grown enormously since the early 1990s. By the way, I have read just around 30% of all the titles here. And I have decided to use the original titles in the list; if you’re curious Wikipedia can help you track the books in your preferred language. The bias in the list, of course, is towards English, as my subject is for the BA in English Studies. And, yes, I know, there should be more women and non-white persons, I’ve done my best… this is very hard work! Enjoy!!!

Early examples

  1. 50/40 BC Julius Caesar. De bello Gallico

Beginnings

  1. 397-398 Saint Augustine. Confessiones

Renaissance

  1. 1561-62 (written 1588) Teresa de Jesús. Vida de la Madre Teresa de Jesús

17th Century

  1. 1666 John Bunyan. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
  2. 1682 Mary Rowlandson. A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

18th Century

  1. 1782-1789. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Les Confessions
  2. 1789-1798 (published 1822-1825) Giacomo Casanova. Histoire de Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, vénitien, écrite par lui-même à Dux, en Bohême
  3. 1791 Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography

19th Century

  1. 1807 (published 1907). Bejamin Constant. Le Cahier rouge
  2. 1811-1814 (vols. I-III); 1933 (vol. IV) Johann Wolfgang, von Goethe. Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit
  3. 1834 Thomas Carlyle. Sartor Resartus
  4. 1845 Frederick Douglass. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
  5. 1850 William Wordsworth. The Prelude
  6. 1854-55 George Sand (Aurore Dupin). Histoire de ma vie
  7. 1855 (published 1877) Harriet Martineau. Autobiography
  8. 1861 Harriet Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
  9. 1864 Cardinal John Henry Newman. Apologia pro Vita Sua
  10. 1871 Henry M. Stanley. How I Found Livingstone
  11. 1873 John Stuart Mill. Autobiography
  12. 1885-1886 Ulysses S. Grant. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
  13. 1885-1899 John Ruskin. Praeterita
  14. 1887 Charles Darwin. Autobiography
  15. 1893 Frances Hodgson Burnett. The One I Knew the Best of All
  16. 1899 Margaret Oliphant. Autobiography

20th Century 1900-1949

  1. 1901 Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery
  2. 1903 Helen Keller. The Story of My Life
  3. 1907 Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams
  4. 1910 Jane Addams. Twenty Years at Hull-House
  5. 1920 Edward Bok. The Americanization of Edward Bok
  6. 1925 Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf
  7. 1925 Thérèse de Lisieux. L’Histoire d’une Âme
  8. 1926 T.E. Lawrence. Seven Pillars of Wisdom
  9. 1927 William Butler Yeats. Autobiographies
  10. 1929 Mahatma Gandhi. The Story Of My Experiments With Truth by Mahatma
  11. 1929 Robert Graves. Good-Bye to All That
  12. 1930 Maxim Gorky. Detstvo
  13. 1931 Emma Goldam. Living My Life
  14. 1931 Margaret Sanger. My Fight for Birth Control
  15. 1931 Albert Schweitzer. Aus meinem Leben und Denken
  16. 1933 George Orwell. Down and Out in Paris and London
  17. 1933 Gertrude Stein. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
  18. 1933 Vera Brittain. Testament of Youth
  19. 1934 Sándor Márai. Egy Polgár Vallomása
  20. 1935 Sigmund Freud. An Autobiographical Study
  21. 1937 Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). Out of Africa
  22. 1938 George Orwell. Homate to Catalonia
  23. 1939 Virginia Woolf. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being
  24. 1942 Beryl Markham. West with the Night
  25. 1942 (written 1939-41) Stefan Zweig. Die Welt von Gester. Erinnerungen eines Europäers
  26. 1944 Pío Baroja, Desde la última vuelta del camino
  27. 1945 Richard Wright. Black Boy
  28. 1948 Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Automoribundia

20th Century 1950-1999

  1. 1951, 1966 Vladimir Nabokov. Speak, Memory
  2. 1955 C.S. Lewis. Surprised by Joy
  3. 1956 Eli Wiesel. Night
  4. 1956 Gerald Durrell. My Familiy and Other Animals
  5. 1958 Primo Levi. Se questo è un uomo
  6. 1959 Rafael Alberti. La arboleda perdida
  7. 1961 Carl Jung. Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken
  8. 1963 Jean Paul Sartre. Les Mots
  9. 1964 Ernest Hemingway. A Moveable Feast
  10. 1964 Charles Chaplin. My Autobiography
  11. 1969 Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
  12. 1972 Peter Handke. Wunschloses Unglück
  13. 1974 Jan Morris. Conundrum
  14. 1974 Pablo Neruda. Confieso que he vivido
  15. 1975 Roland Barthes. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
  16. 1976 Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior
  17. 1977 Eve Babitz. Slow Days, Fast Company
  18. 1977-1985 Elias Canettis. Die gerettete Zunge, 1977; Die Fackel im Ohr, 1980; Das Augenspiel, 1985.
  19. 1978 Harry Crews. A Childhood
  20. 1982 Russell Baker. Growing Up
  21. 1982 Audre Lorde. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
  22. 1982 Michael Ondaatje. Running in the Family
  23. 1982 Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. Dafne y Ensueños
  24. 1983 Joyce Johnson. Minor Characters
  25. 1983 Rigoberta Menchú Tum (& Elizabeth Burgos). I, Rigoberta Menchú
  26. 1983 Eudora Welty. One Writer’s Beginnings
  27. 1984 Janet Frame. An Angel At My Table
  28. 1985 Richard P. Feynman. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
  29. 1987 Vivian Gornick. Fierce Attachments
  30. 1989 Tobias Wolff. This Boy’s Life
  31. 1990 Terenci Moxi. El peso de la paja
  32. 1991 Jung Chang. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
  33. 1991 Philip Roth. Patrimony
  34. 1991 Terry Tempest Williams. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
  35. 1992 Rosa Parks (& Jim Haskins). Rosa Parks: My Story
  36. 1993 Anatole Broyard. Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir
  37. 1993 Lars Eighner. Travels With Lizbeth
  38. 1994 Lucy Grealy. Autobiography of a Face
  39. 1995 Temple Grandin. Thinking in Pictures
  40. 1995 Mary Karr. The Liars’ Club
  41. 1995 James McBride. The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother
  42. 1995 Barack Obama. Dreams From My Father
  43. 1995 Gore Vidal. Palimpsest
  44. 1996 Frank McCourt. Angela’s Ashes
  45. 1997 J.M. Coetzee. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life
  46. 1997 Katharine Graham. Personal History
  47. 1997 Carlos Castilla del Pino. Pretérito imperfecto
  48. 1998 Ernesto Sábato, Antes del fin