Best Autobiographies
These are the top autobiographies and memoirs according to the web’s most popular book blogs. Ranked by how often they were featured.

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An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States.In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African-American to serve in that role—she helped create the most we...
Featured in 9 articles
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mothers side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her ageand has to live with the consequen...
Featured in 7 articles
Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at...
Featured in 6 articles
Anne Frank's extraordinary diary, written in the Amsterdam attic where she and her family hid from the Nazis for two years, has become a world classic and a timeless testament to the human spirit. Now, in a new edition enriched by many passages originally withheld by her father, we meet an Anne more real, more human, and more vital than ever. Here ...
Featured in 6 articles
Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's ...
Featured in 5 articles
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, bor...
Featured in 5 articles
At twenty-six, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's rapid death from cancer, her family drifted apart and her marriage crumbled. With nothing left to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk eleven-hundred miles of the west coast of America and to do it alone. She had no experience of lo...
Featured in 5 articles
'...And then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.' Harriet TubmanIn five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five men in her life, to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these...
Featured in 4 articles
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Celeste Ng"Patti Smith has graced us with a poetic masterpiece, a rare and privileged invitation to unlatch a treasure chest never before breached." - Johnny DeppIt was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would e...
Featured in 4 articles
A deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine—now with all-new, never-before-published material.New York Chef Tony Bourdain gives away secrets of the trade in his wickedly funny, inspiring m...
Featured in 4 articles
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Jon FavreauWhen Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
On Writing by Stephen King
Night by Elie Wiesel
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Sam Walton by Sam Walton
A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
Pour Your Heart Into It by Howard Schultz
Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen
When They Call You a Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard
More Than Enough by Elaine Welteroth
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung
West with the Night by Beryl Markham
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
Iacocca by Lee Iacocca
In the Country We Love by Diane Guerrero
Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan
Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant by Ulysses S. Grant
My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Blackout by Sarah Hepola
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson
Miracles Happen by Mary Kay Ash
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
The HP Way by David Packard
Jack by Jack Welch
Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot
Direct from Dell by Michael Dell
Negroland by Margo Jefferson
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
The Choice by Edith Eva Eger
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Heavy by Kiese Laymon
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
A Promised Land by Barack Obama
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
The Pale-Faced Lie by David Crow
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande
Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda
It's What I Do by Lynsey Addario
The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs
Just as I Am by Cicely Tyson
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
Working by Robert A. Caro
All But My Life by Gerda Klein
Wild Swans by Jung Chang
DearLife by Rachel Clarke
The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn R. Saks
Complications by Atul Gawande
Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang
The White Album by Joan Didion
Insomniac City by Bill Hayes
Awakenings by Oliver Sacks
The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil
A Life in Parts by Bryan Cranston
The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene
The Ugly Cry by Danielle Henderson
All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen
Tomorrow Will Be Different by Sarah McBride
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden
Call Me American by Abdi Nor Iftin
The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit
The Autobiography of Gucci Mane by Gucci Mane
No Happy Endings by Nora McInerny