Fall 2008
Dr. Richard Nordquist

Additional resources for Literary Nonfiction can be found at.

SYLLABUS

WRITERLY ADVICE
-Advice From Writers
-Dr. Seuss on Writing
-E.B. White on Writing
-Mencken on Writing
-Oates on Writing
-Orwell's Rules
-Overcoming Writer's Block
-Thurber on Writing
-Vonnegut on Writing
-What Is Style?
-Woolf on Journals
-Writers on Writing

READING GUIDELINES
As you read your selected text with the book review and class report in mind, please consider the following:
(1)   In terms of the author's style and the book's major theme(s), what do you think are particularly significant passages (generally, 20 to 50 words each)?    Included with your review will be two or three (single-spaced) pages of key passages from the text.  Be sure to identify each passage by page number and (if appropriate) by speaker.
(2)   What genre or genres does this work of nonfiction fall under--if it can even be considered nonfiction at all?
(3)    Can you provide a concise (say, 100-200 words) summary of what the text is about?
(4)    Through reliance on the text itself (as well as some basic research), can you briefly tell us something about the author and explain how this work ranks among the author's overall body of work?
(5)    What specific qualities of the text warrant its characterization as a work of literary nonfiction?
(6)    What are the distinguishing characteristics of the work's persona?
(7)     How is the book structured, and what are some of the distinctive features of the author's style?
(8)     What sort of reader does the book seem to be targeting--and what sort of reader might gain the most enjoyment out of the work?
(9)      What is your overall evaluation of the book?

LITERARY NONFICTION BOOK LIST 

Your reservations are indicated by names in brackets following the  blurbs.

By midterm, please be prepared to select one of the following texts as the subject of your final review and class report. 

I trust that you'll rely on personal interest (rather than length, for instance) as your primary criterion for selecting a text.  (In any case, I'll be suggesting ways to abridge extremely long works--and to supplement unusually short works.  We should all be working with texts--or portions of texts--that run approximately 200-300 pages.)    I do ask that you select a text that you haven't read before.  Please let me know if you have any trouble locating a book that interests you.

Disclaimer: Most of the texts listed here are readily available at the library or at local bookstores.  Links to Amazon.com are for informational purpose only. 

Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, by Piers Paul Reed (1974).  Literary journalism.
"Acknowledged throughout the world as one of the most moving and inspiring stories of survival ever written. In 1973, sixteen Uruguayan boys, most of them teenagers, were rescued after surviving for ten weeks in the snowy wastes of the high Andes after their plane crashed. This is the story of their survival, told with compassion, understanding, and restraint" (publishers' description). 

An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard (1987).   Memoir.
In this re-creation of her childhood in 1950s Pittsburgh, Dillard is not the real subject; "rather, the narrative represents her first-person account of a 'child's interior life' revealed through the connections between that interior landscape and the topography of a 'common history' created out of an American landscape.  While Dillard rejects the label 'social history' for this type of autobiography, American Childhood crosses generic categories as part autobiography, part cultural history, and part philosophy--the characteristic mix of all her works" (EAL 274).

Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, by Barry Lopez (1986).  Nature/Travel.
"A brilliant, moving odyssey across a landscape brimming with beauty and danger . . .   A celebration of earth, sea, ice, and the animals and people who live there . . . A symphony of movement--massive migrations, swirling storms, graceful floes . . .  A showcase of dazzling light--solar and lunar rings, halos, coronas, mountainous mirages, and the awesome aurora borealis . . . A magical book of dreams of why we, outsiders, are drawn to this remote and inspiring region . . . A journey of the mind and heart into a place that grips the imagination with the resonance of its unique and affecting grandeur."  (jacket blurb)

Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer, 1968 (Pulitzer Prize).  "Nonfiction novel."
A blend of factual and fictive reporting about the anti-Vietnam War movement, focused on Mailer's own experiences and reflections during a Pacifist march on the Pentagon.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein (1933).   Biography/social history. 
Stein's narrative records, from Alice's point of view, the daily Parisian life of Stein and her friend Toklas between the two world wars, "focusing mostly on their famous ties to the Lost Generation.  Written in a conventional syntax and straightforward narrative, . . . it is comprised of amusing encounters, breezy critiques of famous art works, lively gossip, witty observations of manners, and memorable portraits of the titans of Modernism, including Hemingway, Picasso, and Matisse" (EAL 1150).

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, edited by Alex Haley (1965).
Autobiography/biography.
":Biography, published in 1965, of the American black militant religious leader and activist who was born Malcolm Little. Written by Alex Haley, who had conducted extensive audiotaped interviews with Malcolm X just before his assassination in 1965, the book gained renown as a classic work on black American experience. The Autobiography recounts the life of Malcolm X from his traumatic
childhood plagued by racism to his years as a drug dealer and pimp, his conversion to the Black Muslim sect (Nation of Islam) while in prison for burglary, his subsequent years of militant activism, and the turn late in his life to more orthodox Islam." [MEL]

Balancing Acts: Essays, by Edward Hoagland (1999).  Travel/nature/personal essays.
Twenty-five of Hoagland's finest essays.  At once deeply critical of our times and and just as deeply involved in its preoccupations, he  writes from the belief set forth in "Heaven and Nature": "Life is a matter of cultivating the six senses, and an equilibrium with nature and what I think of as its subdivision, human nature, trusting no one completely but almost everyone at least a little. 

The Big Sea, by Langston Hughes (1940).  Autobiography
The first volume of autobiography by the African-American poet Langston Hughes is written in an episodic, lightly comic manner.  In addition to providing short accounts of childhood experiences and Hughes's later travels, the book offers a detailed first-hand account of the Harlem Renaissance.

Black Boy, by Richard Wright (1945).  Autobiography.
"Though Black Boy differs in important respects from his life, the general tenor of Wright's narrative is true.  The desertion of his father when Wright was only six years old, the constant moves from one house, town, or state to another and back reflect the instability of his life.  Poverty and illness were the family's lot; hunger, if we count the number of times the word appears in his autobiographical narrative, a more constant companion than any playmate" (OCAAL 793).

Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, "as told through" John G. Neihardt (1932).
Biography/cultural history.
The story of the Messiah--or "Ghost Dance"--movement in South Dakota as well as accounts of pivotal events in the history of the Plains (including the defeat of Custer at the Little Bighorn and the massacre at Wounded Knee) from the Native American perspective.

Blue Highways: A Journey into America, by William Least Heat Moon (William Trogdon), 1982.  Travel/Culture. 
On the old highway maps of America, the main roads were red and the back roads blue.  Least Heat Moon leads the reader on a journey through America's near-forgotten boondocks--the places where the past lives on.  "From calendars to Miss Ginny's Deathbook, tobacco and cotton lore, deluxe cafes, a Trappist monastery, Cajun music, barber shops, the desert, barbed wire, the Hopi and the Navajo, milk shakes, wild horses, 'invarnmentists,' cathouses, hang-gliders, small hotels, old gas stations, touring homes, maple sugarin', New England fishermen--Least Heat Moon tells us what's left of America, what's passing, what's gone" (Chicago Sun-Times) 

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, by Harry Crews (1978).   Autobiography.
Vivid stories, profiles, and histories drawn from the author's  experiences growing up the son of a sharecropper in Bacon County, Georgia, during the Great Depression. 

Coming into the Country, by John McPhee (1977).  This is the story of Alaska and the Alaskans. Written with a vividness and clarity which shifts scenes frequently, and yet manages to tie the work into a rewarding whole, McPhee segues from the wilderness to life in urban Alaska to the remote bush country. "With this book McPhee proves to be the most versatile journalist in America."--Editor's Choice, The New York Times.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater (aka Autobiographic Sketches), by Thomas De Quincey, 1822.  Autobiography.
Harrowing account of the opium-addicted author's travels in Wales and England while struggling to maintain a family and career. 

A Country Year: Living the Questions, by Sue Hubbell (1986).
Memoir.
"When her thirty-year marriage broke up, Sue Hubbell found herself alone and broke on a small Ozarks farm. Keeping bees, she found solace in the natural world.  She began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things that she cared about. The result is one of the best-loved books ever written about life on the land, about a woman finding her way in middle age" (publishers' description).

Coyotes: A Journal through the Secret World of America's Illegal Aliens, by Ted Conover (1986).  Reportage/memoir.
"Ted Conover lived the bizarre life of the Mexican illegals. Theirs is a subterrestrial world of high-wire tensions, of brutal police, of sinister smugglers--coyotes.  A devastating document, this one must be read." -- Leon Uris

Crusade for Justice, by Ida B. Wells (aka Wells-Barnett) 1931.  Autobiography.
"Towards the end of her life, realizing that her work was already becoming forgotten history, Ida B. Wells wrote the massive, unfinished memoirs that form Crusade for Justice. An outspoken and determined woman with seemingly limitless energy, Ida B. Wells began her crusade against the oppression of black people in 1884, when, at the age of sixteen, she sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad for evicting her from a first class car. A teacher and journalist, she began a one-woman anti-lynching campaign after a close friend was murdered. She traveled throughout England and later in the United States gaining support; got married; began the first clubs for black women in the US; started a reading room, shelter, and employment service for black men in Chicago; investigated race riots; and had six children. Her children and husband (she refers to him as "Mr. Barnett") remain almost invisible in this book, but what Crusade for Justice lacks in domestic detail, it makes up for in personal opinion" (from review by Erica Bauermeister).

Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey (1968).   Nature/Travel.
Abbey's "best-known and most widely admired book is a tightly crafted nonfiction journal . . . which recounts his field experiences as a seasonal ranger in Arches National Park.  Part rhapsody, part diatribe, the episodic narrative describes typical chores--cooking over a campfire, exploring remote canyons, recovering the body of a lost hiker--but often slides away into digressive, sometimes furious considerations of the physical environment and man's relationship to it" (EAL 1).  Called "the Thoreau of the West," Abbey makes his readers see the desert as he does--with passion, ecstasy, and unabashed acceptance.

Dispatches, by Michael Herr (1977).  Historical memoir.
"If you've seen the movies "Apocalypse Now" and "Platoon," in whose scripts Michael Herr had a hand, you have a pretty good idea of Herr's take on Vietnam: a hallucinatory mess, the confluence of John Wayne and LSD. Dispatches reports remarkable frontline encounters with an acid-dazed infantryman who can't wait to get back into the field and add Viet Cong kills to his long list ("I just can't hack it back in the World," he says); with a helicopter door gunner who fires indiscriminately into crowds of civilians; with daredevil photojournalist Sean Flynn, son of Errol, who disappeared somewhere inside Cambodia. Although Herr has admitted that parts of his book are fictional, this is meaty, essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Vietnam" (Amazon review).

Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell (1933).  Travel/memoir.
Vowing to "escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man's dominion over man," journalist and novelist George Orwell spent the early years of the Depression working in a series of ill-paid jobs in Paris and London.  This account is considered one of the major works of twentieth-century literary nonfiction, 

Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston (1942).   Autobiography.
The author of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God describes herself "as having felt impelled from her earliest school days to undertake an 'inside search' that often placed her at odds with outside authorities, both black and white.   Acknowledging a 'feeling of difference from my fellow men' that both inhibited and inspired her growing up, Hurston's iconoclasm, particularly on matters of race, has annoyed and perplexed many reviewers and critics who do not take into account Hurston's desire to break out of the model . . . that prescribed how African-American women were to represent themselves" (OCAAL 37).

Elia and The Last Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb (1823/1833).
Essays.
"Few have written more evocatively of the past, of childhood, of loss, of books and plays, of London.  And few have written with such humour whilst enduring such intense personal suffering (all his adult life Lamb cared for his mentally disturbed sister who had stabbed their mother to death).  . . . The Essays of Elia have the self-consciousness that marks the greatest writing of the Romantic movement and [are] crucial to the development of the art of confessional autobiography."  (jacket blurb)

Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey (1918).  Biography.
A "landmark in the history of biography," Strachey's essays on Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon display his "wit, iconoclasm, satiric edge, and narrative powers" (OCEL 942).

The Enormous Room, by E. E. Cummings (1922).  Autobiographical narrative.
"As members of an American ambulance corps in France during World War I, the author and a friend are erroneously suspected of treasonable correspondence, and imprisoned by the French in a concentration camp at La Ferte Mace, 100 miles west of Paris.  . . . All [of the prisoners] suffer under the needlessly cruel stresses of captivity . . ..   Nevertheless, they mainrain the idiosyncratic beauties and humors of individual character" (OCAL 231).

Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston (1973).   Autobiography and social history.
Manzanar is a Spanish word that means "apple orchard."  It was also the name of a hastily built internment camp for Japanese and Japanese-Americans that was erected in the high desert country of the Owens Valley, just northeast of Los Angeles, in the early days of World War II.  In 1942, when Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old, she, her mother, and her old brothers and sisters were ordered out of their house in Long Beach and exiled to Manzanar for the duration of the war.  This is their story.  

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas : A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S. Thompson (1972).  "Gonzo journalism": fictionalized memoir and reportage.
"On assignment from a sports magazine to cover 'the fabulous Mint 400'--a free-for-all biker's race in the heart of the Nevada desert--the drug-a-delic duo stumbles through Vegas in hallucinatory hopes of finding the American dream (two truck-stop waitresses tell them it's nearby, but can't remember if it's on the right or the left).   They of course never get the story, but they do commit the only sins in Vegas: 'burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help.'  For Thompson to remember and pen his experiences with such clarity and wit is nothing short of a miracle; an impressive feat no matter how one feels about the subject matter. A first-rate sensibility twinger, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a pop-culture classic, an icon of an era past and a nugget of pure comedic genius." --Rebekah Warren 

Great Plains, by Iain Frazier (1990).  Travel and social history.
With customary wit, the satirical New Yorker essayist (author of the collection Dating Your Mom) recounts the human history of the American midwest. 

Hiroshima, by John Hersey (1946).  Profiles/Reportage. 
"When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, few could have anticipated its potential for devastation. Pulitzer prize-winning author John Hersey recorded the stories of Hiroshima residents shortly after the explosion and, in 1946, Hiroshima was published, giving the world first-hand accounts from people who had survived it.  The words of Miss Sasaki, Dr. Fujii, Mrs. Nakamara, Father Kleinsorg, Dr. Sasaki, and the Reverend Tanimoto gave a face to the statistics that saturated the media and solicited an overwhelming public response. Whether you believe the bomb made the difference in the war or that it should never have been dropped, Hiroshima is a must read for all of us who live in the shadow of armed conflict" (review).

Hometown, by Tracy Kidder (1999).  Travel/profiles/social study.
Combining postcard prettiness and urban peril, Northampton, writes Kidder, "still preserves the old pattern of the New England township, a place with a full set of parts." That set includes apparent order, leafy neighborhoods, a thriving downtown and the elite Smith College. But through that stability run cracks: ragged housing projects, crumbling infrastructure and crime.  Kidder...taps the town's diversity selectively, profiling a single mother from California who studies at Smith, a
crack-addled drug informant, a judge, a lawyer whose obsessive compulsive disorder occasions bizarre behavior, and, at greatest length, a 33-year-old police sergeant who touches all their lives to varying degrees. As Kidder contrasts diverse newcomers' delight with the more seasoned, conflicted emotions of natives, his book turns into an examination of what holds those who stay, what draws those who come, and what haunts those who leave. Kidder's vision combines the realistic detail of a documentary with the broad sweep and imagination of a 19th-century novel of the streets . . .  (from Publishers Weekly)

Hunger of Memory, by Richard Rodriguez (1982).  Autobiography.
"Hunger Of Memory is the story of a Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum. Here is the poignant journey is a 'minority student' who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation -- from his past, his parents, his culture -- and so describes the high price of "making it" in middle class America.
Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger Of Memory is a powerful political statement, a profound study of the importance of language . . . and the moving,intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man."  (publisher's description)

The Immense Journey, by Loren Eiseley (1957).  Nature/science essays.
An anthropologist and environmentalist, Eiseley has been credited by Annie Dillard with "restoring the essay's place in imaginative literature" and extending the "symbolic capacity" of the essay form.  The Immense Journey contains some of Eiseley's most frequently anthologized essays.  (EAL 318)

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, 1965.   "Nonfiction novel."
Capote spent six years investigating the murder of a family in western Kansas by two disturbed drifters.  The result is a riveting account of the crime, trial, and execution. 

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, by Alice Walker (1983).  Essays.
In this collection of speeches and essays, Walker discusses the importance of the unacknowledged artists of the 19th century and earlier who maintained a creative tradition through slave narratives, oral accounts of their lives, or traditional stories.   "Walker draws her authority from black folk life, whose forms break with the traditional fiction patterns of the white, male literary tradition" (EAL 1185).

A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe (1722).  Fictionalized memoir/history.
Narrated by "H.F.," an inhabitant of London who purportedly was an eyewitness to the devastation that followed the outbreak of bubonic plague, the book was a historical and fictional reconstruction by Defoe (author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders).  .

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee (text) and Walker Evans (photographs), 1941.  Literary journalism.
A portrait (verbal and photographic) of three sharecropping families during the Great Depression, this book is one of the most notable works of twentieth-century literary nonfiction.  "On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery" (Mary Park).

A Mencken Chrestomathy, by H. L. Mencken (1949).   Social and literary essays and articles.
The best collection (chosen by the author himself) of Mencken's lively, humorous, and hyperbolic writings.  "Consistent with his aim 'to stir up the animals,' Mencken . . . frequently poses as the fiercely antidemocratic aristocrat who at the same time boasts joyously of his vulgarity and common tastes.  A Juvenalian skeptic and Rabelaisian debunker, he ridicules the enemy, which can be identified broadly as Mencken's rhetorically forged 'America'" (Nordquist in EAL 758). 

A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway, 1964.   Autobiographical Fiction.
In this romanticized account of the expatriate life in 1920s Paris, Hemingway "paints himself as a starving young artist by not mentioning his wife's independent income.   Hemingway disparaged those [such as Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein] who had been his friends in Paris and who had helped him as a writer, but the writing is sure and evocative" (EAL 513).

Names, by N. Scott Momaday, 1977.  Memoir.
Momaday's quest for his American Indian roots takes him back to the hills of his ancestral Kentucky to the high planes of Wyoming, and from there to the Bering Strait.   "It is a search and a celebration at the same time, a book of identity and of sources.  The book attempts to show that Momaday himself does not feel the conflict of Kiowa and white traditions; he presents himself in the book as their product, an artist, heir of the experiences of his ancestors and conscious of the strong underlying dormant influence on his life" (EAL 781).

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, 1845/1892.  Autobiography.
Vivid picture of slave life targeted at an audience of white, middle-class Christians who were in a position to recognize the horror and evils of slavery and then to act upon their feelings to abolish the practice.   [Though this book is the most famous of Douglass's writings, he wrote two other autobiographies: My bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881).]

Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin (1955).  Essays.
Following an autobiographical introduction, the collection of ten essays includes literary criticism (e.g., "Everybody's Protest Novel"--on Uncle Tom's Cabin), travel writing ("A Question of Identity"--on the American student colony in Paris), and social criticism ("The Harlem Ghetto").  The book concludes with one of Baldwin's most famous essays, "Stranger in the Village."  (OCAAL 541).

One Man's Meat, by E. B. White (1944).  Personal essays.
A collection of essays written for Harper's between 1938 and 1943, recounting White's escape from New York City to rural Maine to deal with the small conflicts in his own life while the great conflict of World War II raged in the distance.   

One Writer's Beginnings, by Eudora Welty (1975) plus selected personal essays..  Memoir.
Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Harvard University, Welty's book recounts her lifelong affection for Jackson, Mississippi, and provides the "factual" data that Welty transformed in such novels as Delta Wedding and The Optimist's Daughter.

Orlando, by Virginia Woolf (1928).  Fictional biography (of Vita Sackville West).
"In 1928, way before everyone else was talking about  gender-bending and way, way before the terrific movie with Tilda Swinton, Virginia Woolf wrote her comic masterpiece, a fantastic, fanciful love letter disguised as a biography, to Vita Sackville-West. Orlando enters the book as an Elizabethan nobleman and leaves the book three centuries and one change of gender later as a liberated woman of the 1920s.   Along the way this most rambunctious of Woolf's characters engages in sword fights, trades barbs with 18th century wits, has a baby, and drives a car.  This is a deliriously written, breathless-making book and a classic both of lesbian literature and the Western canon" (Amazon review).  

The People of the Abyss, by Jack London (1903).  Social study.
Best known as the author of the novel The Call of the Wild, Jack London was a "literary journalist" of the first order, and this close study of slum conditions in turn-of-the-century London is considered by many to be his most important work.

Picture, by Lillian Ross (1952).  Literary Journalism.
"When New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross heard that John Huston was planning to make a film of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, she decided she would follow the movie's progress 'in order to learn whatever I might learn about the American motion-picture industry.'   In the spring of 1950, Huston visited New York and called the young writer to say that progress was not smooth:
'Come on over, kid, and I'll tell you all about the hassle.'   In the words of New Yorker editor William Shawn,  ' On the surface, Miss Rosshas written a precise, marvelously detailed account of how one motion-picture, The Red Badge of Courage, was made.  Beyond that,exuberant, she has presented everything any sane person should want to know about how a big film studio functions.  And beyond that, she has written what must be called, for lack of a more appropriate word, the definitive book on  the Hollywood community--its language, its manners, its preoccupations, its ideas.  Last, she has told a dramatic story about some extraordinary people, and, in a triumph of interlineation, has written a treatise on human nature'" (publisher's description).

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard (1974, Pulitzer).  Nature/spiritual writing.
A late-20th-century revision of Thoreau's Walden in the form of a year's sojourn in the Roanoke Valley of Virginia.  "A mix of personal revelation and intense examination of the natural world, Pilgrim is broadly Christian in its celebration of creation amid nature's violence, yet Emersonian in the particular mysticism evident in Dillard's perspective of the relationship between the writer and the world" (EAL 273). 

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe (1979).  Literary journalism.
Wolfe's most successful work of nonfiction recounts the story of the Mercury astronauts of the early 1960s.  "While undercutting some of the heroic mythology of the space program, Wolfe also makes the astronauts vivid as characters--and as heroic ones at that.   . . . Wolfe presents the culture of test pilots, and relates their distinctive world to the larger American culture of the time" (EAL 1259)

Sartor Resartus : The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh, by Thomas Carlyle (1838).  "A discourse on the philosophy of clothes
. . . leading to the conclusion that all symbols, forms, and human institutions are properly clothes, and as such temporary; and . . . in some measure the author's autobiography" (OCEL 866-867).

Self-Consciousness, by John Updike (1989).  Memoirs.
"One of our finest novelists now gives us his most dazzling creation -- his own life.   In six eloquent and compelling chapters, the author of The Witches of Eastwick and the wonderful Rabbit trilogy gives us an incitingly honest look at the makings of an American writer -- and of an American man.  Here is Updike on his childhood, on ailments both horrible (psoriasis) and hilarious (his experiences
at the hands of a dentist), on his stuttering, on his feelings during the Vietnam War, on his genealogy.  And on that most elusive of subjects, his innermost self. What emerges is a fascinating, fully formed portrait--candid, often very, funny, and always illuminating." (publisher's blurb)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), by Joan Didion.  Cultural and autobiographical essays. Nonfictional studies of contemporary American life, with a particular focus on California, her synecdoche for a deteriorating modern world.

The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen (1979).  Travel.
When Matthiessen went to Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and, possibly, to glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard, he undertook his five-week trek as winter snows were sweeping into the high passes.  This is a radiant and deeply moving account of a "true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart."

The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich (1986).  Travel and memoir.
"Whether she's reflecting on nature's teachings, divulging her experiences as a cowpuncher, or painting vivid word portraits of the people she lives and works with, Gretel Ehrlich's observations are lyrical and funny, wise and authentic. After moving from the city to a vast new state, she writes of adjusting to cowboy life, boundless open spaces, and the almost incomprehensible harshness of a Wyoming winter" (Amazon review).

The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder (1981).  Literary journalism.
"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, The Soul of a New Machine was a bestseller on its first publication in 1981. With the touch of an expert thriller writer, Tracy Kidder recounts the feverish efforts of a team of Data General researchers to create a new 32-bit superminicomputer. A compelling account of individual sacrifice and human ingenuity, The Soul of a New Machine endures as the classic chronicle of the computer age and the masterminds behind its technological advances." (publisher's description)

The Souls of Black Folks, by W. E. B. Du Bois (1903).  Influential collection of 14 essays--"by turns lyrical, historical, and autobiographical.   Here, Du Bois records the cruelties of racism, celebrates the strength and pride of black America, and explores the paradoxical "double-consciousness" of African-American life. "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line," he writes, prophesying the struggle for freedom that became his life's work" (publisher's description).

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, by Vladimir Nabokov (1966).  Memoir.
The author of Lolita recounts his experiences growing up in Imperial Russia while providing insights into some of his major works of fiction.

Taking the World in for Repairs, by Richard Selzer (1986).  Essays/Medicine.  

Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck (1962).   Travel.
In 1960, the author of Grapes of Wrath (by then a rather ill old man) stepped into a truck with his dog, Charley, and drove around America to discover the roots of his creativity--"to see the people and the landscapes and the images that were the source of his vivid realism and the reason for his continued appeal" (EAL 1087).

An Unknown Woman: A Journey to Self-Discovery, by Alice Koller (1981).   Memoir/travel. 
Often characterized as a "female Walden," this work explores philosophical and psychological issues of identity as Koller recounts her experiences at a private retreat on Nantucket Island.

Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories, by Joseph Mitchell (1993).   Reportage and personal essays.
"Mitchell lovingly chronicled the lives of odd New York characters. In the pages of Up In the Old Hotel, the reader passes through places such as McSorley's Old Ale House or the Fulton Fish Market that many observers might have found ordinary.  But when experienced through Mitchell's gifted eye, the reader will see that these haunts of old New York possess poetry, beauty, and meanin" (Amazon review).

A Walker in the City, by Alfred Kazin (1951).  Autobiography.
In the first (and most famous) of his three autobiographical volumes, literary critic Alfred Kazin recounts his experiences growing up in a Jewish section of Brooklyn known as Brownsville.  This "ghetto" was where Margaret Sanger opened her first birth-control clinic, where Emma Goldman ran an ice-cream parlor, and where the New York Anarchists Club once tried to hold a Yom Kippur Ball until it was raided by the police.

Walking the Dead Diamond River, by Edward Hoagland (1985).  Essays/Nature.
Nineteen essays by "the Thoreau of our time."  In a New York Times book review, Alfred Kazin characterized Hoagland as "one of the best personal essayists in the business, a virtuoso of the reader-capsizing sentence, a splendid observer of city street, circus lot, go-go girls, freight trains, juries in the jury room, plus, and especially, any and every surviving patch of North American wild he can get to the moon around in.  . . .  [This book] is noteworthy and somehow endearing because it presents a man who still believes in joy and is always waiting for the rapture on the next mountain trail."  

Whoredom in Kimmage: The Private Lives of Irish Women, by Rosemary Mahoney (1993).   Literary journalism.
"Written with the art of a skilled fiction writer whose ear for Irish bluster is pitch-perfect, Whoredom in Kimmage tells the tale of contemporary Irish women through a series of brilliantly animated scences that take the reader from Dillon's tiny pub in rural Corofin to the heart of Dublin. This beguiling account of Irish life transcends that nation's small shores through the power of Mahoney's great storytelling gifts." (publisher's description) 

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston (1989).  Memoir.
An account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California.  Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her
family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig (1975).   Memoir/philosophical meditation.
"Arguably one of the most profoundly important essays ever written on the nature and significance of  'quality' and definitely a necessary anodyne to the consequences of a modern world pathologically
obsessed with quantity.  Although set as a story of a cross-country trip on a motorcycle by a father and son, it is more nearly a journey through 2,000 years of Western philosophy.  For some people, this has been a truly life-changing book" (Amazon review). 

Citations

EAL: Encyclopedia of American Literature, ed. Steven R. Serrafin (New York: Continuum, 1999).

MEL: Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature (1965).

OCAAL: Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1997).

OCAL: Oxford Companion to American Literature, 5th ed., ed. James D. Hart (New York: Oxford UP, 1983).

OCEL: Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble (London: Oxford UP, 1985).