Nonfiction
Lives Worth Reading About
Biography and memoir that read like the best fiction.
14 books · ranked
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1
Maus
Spiegelman recounts his father Vladek's experience as a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, told through interviews in the present day and rendered as comics in which Jews are mice and Nazis are cats. The two-volume work won a Pulitzer Prize and is one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust in any medium, as well as a meditation on the act of bearing witness.
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2
Educated
A woman raised off-grid by survivalist parents finds her way to a PhD; an astonishing memoir of self-invention.
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3
Born a Crime
Growing up mixed-race under and after apartheid; funny, sharp and genuinely moving.
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4
Becoming
Michelle Obama's memoir traces her journey from the South Side of Chicago through Princeton, Harvard Law School, a career in public service and eight years in the White House. Intimate, politically engaged and carefully crafted, it is one of the bestselling memoirs ever published.
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5
The Diary of a Young Girl
A teenage girl's diary while hiding from the Nazis; one of the most important and human documents of the century.
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6
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou's memoir of her childhood and adolescence in the American South and in California — the racism, the trauma and the gradual emergence of her voice through literature. One of the most widely assigned and most challenged memoirs in American education, it announces one of the great literary voices of the 20th century.
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7
The Year of Magical Thinking
A clear-eyed account of grief after the sudden loss of a husband; precise and unsparing.
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8
Just Mercy
Bryan Stevenson, a young lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, recounts his early career defending death row prisoners in Alabama — including Walter McMillian, a Black man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. Stevenson's memoir is one of the most important accounts of the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor, the mentally ill and people of colour.
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9
The Argonauts
Part memoir, part theory, part love story — Nelson writes about her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge and her pregnancy, while drawing on feminist philosophy, queer theory and literary criticism. The Argonauts is a book about how language both creates and fails the experiences it tries to hold.
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10
Black Boy
Richard Wright's autobiographical account of his childhood and youth in the Jim Crow South — the hunger, the violence, the white employer who takes him to a library, the reading that opens a world while making life in Mississippi impossible. One of the great American memoirs and one of the founding texts of the 20th-century Black literary tradition.
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11
A Small Place
A long, fierce essay addressed directly to the European tourist arriving in Antigua, Kincaid's essay is one of the most powerful pieces of postcolonial writing in English — about the relationship between tourism and colonialism, about the corruption that replaced British colonial rule, and about what it means to live in a place that others only visit.
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12
This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff's memoir of his adolescence in 1950s America — moving with his mother from town to town, enduring a cruel stepfather named Dwight, petty criminality and an elaborate scheme to escape to a school he has no right to attend. A foundational American memoir and a study in the complicated relationship between the person you were and the writer you became.
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13
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass's account of his life in slavery — learning to read despite prohibition, the brutal violence of the system, and his eventual escape. Written to prove that he had indeed been enslaved (some doubted his account given his eloquence), the Narrative is one of the foundational texts of American literature and abolitionism.
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14
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
As told to Alex Haley, The Autobiography follows Malcolm's journey from a troubled childhood in Michigan through criminal activity, prison, conversion to Islam and transformation into one of America's most electrifying and controversial political figures — ending with his shift toward a more universal view of human rights before his assassination in 1965.