Recommend me some autobiographies, /lit/.

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Anonymous Thu Apr 26 18:51:33 2018 No.11060909 [Reply] [Original]

Recommend me some autobiographies, /lit/.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 18:52:46 2018 No.11060913 >>11060909 No.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 19:06:30 2018 No.11061004 >>11060913 Why not?

Anonymous Thu Apr 26 19:29:02 2018 No.11061136

>>11060909

SOME GOOD AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
-------------------------------------------------
(Clearly some of these can only loosely be called "autobiographies" but have merit in their own right.)

>Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking
It's light and perhaps a bit self-satisfied but still definitely worth reading, especially as it doesn't take long.

>Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
Better than the film.

>Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
To some extent this is Hemingway using his own life as material to write a Hemingway novel. But that's OK.

>H.D. Thoreau, Walden
Obviously this is on the edge of "biography" but it's the seminal "back to nature" work and has a lot of fine philosophical ranting. We like ranting.

>James Watson, The Double Helix
Just a few months in the author's life. But they're kinda important months.

>Joan Didion, The Year Of Magical Thinking
Again this is "autobiography used as raw material for literature", so if you don't want that, look elsewhere. She can really write, though.

>Jung Chang, Wild Swans
It's grandmother-mother-author, so perhaps more history than autobiography, but it's still something of a must-read.

>A. Solzenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
Same as above, kinda a must-read that happens to be largely autobiographical.

>Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
Public school, World War One. No surprise Graves decided to go and live somewhere far away.

>George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia & Down and Out in Paris and London
Orwell might have been fighting on the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War but he still writes honestly and perceptively.

>Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel
"Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier." - Samuel Johnson

>Roald Dahl, Boy & Going Solo
If you like RD you'll like them. If you don't, you should.

Anonymous Thu Apr 26 19:32:16 2018 No.11061153

>>11061136
>A. Solzenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
>Same as above, kinda a must-read that happens to be largely autobiographical.

Also 99% bullshit. The only realistic thing that happens in it is that there are humans. I don't know why anyone references that piece of shit, and I say that as an anarchist who hates Stalin.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 19:32:57 2018 No.11061156 Confessions of a Mask

Anonymous Thu Apr 26 19:36:52 2018 No.11061183

>>11061136

A few more off the top of my head:

>David Niven, The Moon's A Balloon
The golden age of Hollywood. He's a great storyteller.

>Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles
Taped interviews with Peter Bogdanovich. Welles was the man. (This is perhaps not as useful a recommendation as the Niven because you need to know Welles' work to enjoy it and if you're a fan you'll most likely have read it already.)

>Andre Agassi, Open
Normally sports autobiographies are terrible, because the athletes themselves don't understand what makes them so great. (David Foster Wallace wrote a good and funny article on this topic called "How Tracey Austin Broke My Heart".) But Agassi's is far better than most. You really get a sense of how much stress, mental and physical, there is in being a top tennis player.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 19:41:27 2018 No.11061202 >>11060909 It's semi-autobiographical but, No Longer Human.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 19:43:40 2018 No.11061216 File: 68 KB, 336x517, the-autobiography-of-malcolm-x.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 19:49:12 2018 No.11061237 >>11060909 >tfw no Biene Maja chair

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 19:49:36 2018 No.11061238 Gaius Iulius Caesar

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 20:45:51 2018 No.11061471 >>11060909 The autobiography of Ben Franklin, ideally with his other writings.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 21:10:35 2018 No.11061567 >>11061156 Just finished this one, it's fantastic

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 21:14:26 2018 No.11061577 File: 96 KB, 640x672, A346BB3F-8820-4D10-9CEC-F417ECE45448.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Unironically

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 21:14:59 2018 No.11061579 >>11060909 Mein Kampf

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 21:16:01 2018 No.11061584 >>11060909 My diary desu

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 21:18:00 2018 No.11061596 >>11061237 It's Včelka Mája to me, but wtf, it's actually a japanese anime?? here I was my entire life believing it was a slavic cartoon in the vein of Bolek i Lolek or Krtek.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 21:18:33 2018 No.11061597 Confessions (Augustine obviously)

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 21:19:48 2018 No.11061604 >>11061584 Surprised it took this long

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 21:53:48 2018 No.11061722 >>11060909 The Alexiad

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 21:54:52 2018 No.11061727 >>11060909 Josephus -The Jewish War

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 21:54:52 2018 No.11061728 >>11060909 direct autobiographies are unilaterally awful. semi-autobiographical fiction on the other hand is the best

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 22:00:32 2018 No.11061757 >>11061728 I think you mean "uniformly". And they're not.

>>	Anonymous Thu Apr 26 22:14:15 2018 No.11061807 >>11061216 Isn't that book more of a white pussy commentary than it is a Malcolm X biography?

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 05:08:35 2018 No.11062913 >>11060909 That book norm macdonald wrote if you find him funny

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 05:10:55 2018 No.11062917 Elias Canetti's books and Speak, Memory.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 05:21:00 2018 No.11062931 File: 31 KB, 228x350, chronicles-9780743244589_lg.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>11060909 Dylan is the fucking man

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 05:53:46 2018 No.11062971 >>11061153 why would you believe soviet propaganda though and not a victim of the regime

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 06:01:26 2018 No.11062979 >>11062971 Because Solzjenitsyn shows the inhumanity of socialism and socialism for some inexplicable reason is a good thing.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 06:04:02 2018 No.11062984 File: 198 KB, 1024x768, 1500084966511.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>11062979

Anonymous Fri Apr 27 06:18:02 2018 No.11063020

>>11061136
>>George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia & Down and Out in Paris and London
>Orwell might have been fighting on the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War but he still writes honestly and perceptively.
fuck off back to pol or reddit or wherever you came from

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:24:08 2018 No.11064728 >>11062971 I believe facts and comparisons not someone's fan-fiction meant to push an agenda.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:27:28 2018 No.11064741 >>11064728 I thought everything was subjective though

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:29:50 2018 No.11064751 >>11064741 That is incorrect.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:31:08 2018 No.11064758 >>11064751 so you believe in objective truth then?

Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:31:28 2018 No.11064760

>>11061577
>With [professional author]

why even bother calling it an autobiography. you know in every single one of these cases that the celebrity didn't write a single word, because they don't have the motivation or discipline to actually write a book.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:31:36 2018 No.11064761 Ayaan Hirsi Ali's

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:32:26 2018 No.11064769 >>11064758 Objective fact, yes. Gulag Archipelago is not objective anything.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:32:43 2018 No.11064773 File: 512 KB, 1227x1024, 171_chom_A11323_pdt[1].jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Let's get back on track and stop politicsposting

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:36:32 2018 No.11064784 >>11064773 I agree. Shackleton is a great autobiography based on his own notes. Parachute Infantry is also a great viewpoint from David Kenyon Webster on his time in the 101st during WW2.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:38:42 2018 No.11064796 >>11064773 >A113-23 at the top of the right page >A113 I've been brain molested by Disney

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:42:39 2018 No.11064806 >>11064796 I know 1138 but wtf is A113

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:50:26 2018 No.11064837 >>11060909 THE classic's Cellini's. Two very short ones (also Italian) that I enjoyed are Cardano's and Vico's. May want to check out the latter's New Science before reading his, however.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 15:59:03 2018 No.11064871 File: 20 KB, 300x459, wagner.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 16:04:08 2018 No.11064911 >>11064871 wagner was a bad composer and an even worse writer though

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 16:26:17 2018 No.11065026 >>11064911 people dont read cellini for the prose or his golden trinkets either

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 16:30:19 2018 No.11065044 >>11064911 >wagner was a bad composer everybody who holds this opinion knows nothing about music or is just so enraged by Wagner that they refuse to be fair to him.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 16:31:46 2018 No.11065050 good prose but boring life: stendhals autobios >but muh napoleonic era he kept distance from real battle hours

Anonymous Fri Apr 27 16:35:30 2018 No.11065071

>>11065044
I'm a music conservatory graduate. I spent years analyzing music for grades, so when I come across something that's garbage, I know. Wagner's music has the melodic complexity of a train horn (actually less; train horns often are tuned to a tritone, which seem to be absent in his music) and the lyrical complexity of his non-traditional vocal works barely surpasses 3rd grade vocabulary. Not only is this music intended for ignorant audiences, it's intended to turn impressionable young people into bad composers. The purpose of a composer is not to discover and use more and more dissonant harmonies, if that were the case classical music has reached it's end a long time ago.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 16:53:26 2018 No.11065162 >>11060909 Imagine kissing her and stroking her hair heh

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 17:00:40 2018 No.11065194 >>11065162 Imagine being in a coffin where you slowly suffocate, powerless to avert your death, but simultaneously welcoming it

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 17:07:00 2018 No.11065215 >>11065162 I wish I was dead.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 17:10:44 2018 No.11065232 >>11065162 haha can you imagine like going on a ferris wheel with her? that'd be so stupid and gay lol

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 17:15:18 2018 No.11065255 The Story of a Soul by Saint Therese of Lisieux

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 17:30:39 2018 No.11065302 >>11060909 LITERAL WHO

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 23:13:12 2018 No.11066637 File: 41 KB, 500x409, the gulag archipielago was fiction, the authors wife confirmed.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>11061153 This.

>>	The Red Barron Fri Apr 27 23:28:16 2018 No.11066687 the Carl Panzram book

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 23:46:32 2018 No.11066778 >>11064769 It's objective bullshit

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 23:52:00 2018 No.11066800 >>11066778 I'll give you that one.

>>	Anonymous Fri Apr 27 23:57:19 2018 No.11066820 >>11061471 this and Goethe

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 01:13:45 2018 No.11067058 >>11061579 Min Kamp, you mean.

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 01:25:38 2018 No.11067104 >>11061757 People fail to see themselves for who they actually were, simple as that. Which is why other people can give you more insight about yourself than you even can in many aspects. Why do you think Walter Isaacson has a job?

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 01:42:57 2018 No.11067158 File: 175 KB, 429x640, Dictee.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] PLZ do not talk about autobiography unless you have read pic related

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 03:14:04 2018 No.11067376 >>11067104 this is a hopelessly naive post, shown by the fact that you felt this needed to be said. How does a biographer see someone for who they "actually" were?

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 03:44:27 2018 No.11067432 >>11060909 Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 03:45:09 2018 No.11067438 What's Welsh for Zen by John Cale

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 11:13:47 2018 No.11068566 File: 31 KB, 319x474, sand.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] roman à clef about living with chopin

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 12:19:49 2018 No.11068758 I thought of a few and then realised that they're all biographies as the subjects are dead.

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 13:19:13 2018 No.11068988 File: 268 KB, 1200x758, 1517717878320.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>11068758 woke

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 13:26:19 2018 No.11069018 >>11061153 >I say this as an anarchist Opinion discarded. Gulag Archiplego is only innacurate if you simply don't like the author for your own biased reasons (being a radical lefty)

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 13:27:41 2018 No.11069027 >>11063020 >Republicans >Good guys Wew, the Nationalists were objectively the good side go fuck off to leftypol or reddit if you think otherwise

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 13:51:13 2018 No.11069159 >>11069027 what are you doing on /lit/ this is not a place for political ideologues, we require at least some basic level of intelligence and intellectual commitment

Anonymous Sat Apr 28 13:58:40 2018 No.11069200
File: 66 KB, 647x672, 1505914546392.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>11069159
>this is not a place for political ideologues,
Yet you're here. Hmmmmmmmmmm...

Franco, the Carlists, and the Falangists were objectively the good guys of the Spanish Civil War. Catalonia should've been raised, Guernica best day of my life. Should have thought before you decided to massacre clergymen / nuns

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 13:59:42 2018 No.11069203 >>11069200 >raised *Razed A typo

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 13:59:46 2018 No.11069204 >>11069200 why? they’re thieving liars

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 14:00:32 2018 No.11069209 >>11069200 not the same guy idiot you have to go back

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 14:04:09 2018 No.11069231 >>11069204 Heroes who purged lftist scum >>11069209 >Not the same guy Lftists > lberals

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 14:04:11 2018 No.11069232 >>11064728 So you don't believe in the Holocaust?

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 15:46:24 2018 No.11069642 Orwell's down and out in Paris and London ..... That counts right ?

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 15:53:29 2018 No.11069664 >>11067376 You can observe other people through accounts of them and their actions to be interpreted by the reader. In autobiographies the writer does this him/herself cause ego.

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 16:25:15 2018 No.11069797 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography.

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 16:35:05 2018 No.11069847 7 Shades of Yellow by Alfonse Lo Bello

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 18:50:37 2018 No.11070449 >>11060909 Two Years before the Mast, R. H. Dana

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 19:41:12 2018 No.11070661 File: 60 KB, 500x743, Longandhard.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] This but unironically Even though Neil Strauss probably wrote most of it

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 20:16:23 2018 No.11070804 >>11067158 I'm probably the only other anon on this board who's read it, I didn't think it was all that great

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 20:19:06 2018 No.11070817 >>11068758 based

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 21:05:17 2018 No.11070989 >>11070804 wat... I thought it was fantastic , like it was the first book that really undermined logocentrism. Maybe I'm just a dirty post-modernist

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 21:07:14 2018 No.11070997 >>11070989 *first book for me

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 21:09:21 2018 No.11071008 >>11060909 The Autobiography of Malcolm Y

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 21:11:46 2018 No.11071016 >>11065162 ...at a hockey game. love hockey bitches

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 21:24:05 2018 No.11071056 >>11064728 >fan-fiction meant to push an agenda You mean like most pro-Soviet propaganda?

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 21:41:40 2018 No.11071111 Malcolm X. >>11061153 It's required reading in Russia, and the detractors were basically confirmed KGB. There's others who've written similar accounts, though they're not nearly as famous (some are published by universities).

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 21:46:24 2018 No.11071128 File: 42 KB, 300x457, ric-flair-to-be-the-man-book-cover.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>11060909 Unironically this is a great read

>>	Anonymous Sat Apr 28 21:50:13 2018 No.11071143 >>11071111 Forgot to mention. Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth by Tolstoy (published by Everyman's Library) are good autobiographical novels. They were published in his 20s.

>>	Anonymous Sun Apr 29 01:43:51 2018 No.11072090 >>11064806 google it.

>>	Anonymous Sun Apr 29 02:32:34 2018 No.11072225 >>11065162 >heh Yeah heh... ;_;

>>	Anonymous Sun Apr 29 06:45:21 2018 No.11072850 File: 206 KB, 943x1320, goethe.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] so are we still living in the goethe epoch of autobios or have there been more nnovations in the genre?

>>	Anonymous Sun Apr 29 08:22:17 2018 No.11073082 Kissinger by Isaacson, Gulag Archipelago by Solzenitsyn, The Titan (Rockefeller) by Chernow American Prometheus (Oppenheimer) by Bird Genius (Feynman) by Gleick Xiaoping (Deng Xiapeng) by Vogel

>>	Anonymous Sun Apr 29 08:23:36 2018 No.11073086 >>11073082 And last (and not least!), Napoleon by Andrew Roberts

>>	Anonymous Sun Apr 29 13:42:36 2018 No.11074044 Chickenhawk by Robert Mason Picked it up, read a bit. Read continuously for several days.

>>	Anonymous Sun Apr 29 15:19:52 2018 No.11074405 montaigne's essays

>>	Anonymous Sun Apr 29 15:50:50 2018 No.11074499 >>11065071 Are you jewish?

>>	Anonymous Sun Apr 29 16:52:17 2018 No.11074716 The Power Broker (Caro) Education of a Felon (Bunker) Napoleon: A Life (Roberts)

>>	Anonymous Sun Apr 29 20:17:38 2018 No.11075407 >>11074716 >autobiographies

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/lit/ - Literature