Nation Topics - Autobiography and Memoir | The Nation

Isaiah Berlin once told his biographer, Michael Ignatieff, that "I have a natural tendency to gossip, to describing things, to noticing things, to interest in human beings and their characters, t

Former Presidents have a difficult, even awkward, role. They cope in different ways, but if the past half-century is any guide, we can be certain of one thing: They write their memoirs.

In 1965, nearly forty years before the publication of Where I Was From, her most recent and most sustained meditation on her native state of California, the novelist and essayist Joan Didi

"This is a book written in the presence of music." So begins Geoffrey
O'Brien's sprawling memoir-cum-critical essay, and the reader is tempted
to ask: What book isn't?

In 1964 an important if somewhat obscure Polish writer and public intellectual named Aleksander Wat arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, and began the work that would eventually bec

John Hess, who, it should be said, is one of The Nation's oldest friends and severest critics, once complained to me about an "editor's choice" blurb I'd written, which contained a brief

From its unification in 1871 until its comprehensive defeat in 1945, Germany was the most bellicose and nationalistic of modern countries.

Most Americans take their system of government for granted, as if Moses himself had delivered the Constitution engraved on marble tablets.

As ways of writing about a past, memoirs and autobiographies, although in practice they may often overlap, are different undertakings.

On the page, Patricia Highsmith could inspire a law-abiding citizen to
become a willing accomplice to murder, at least within the realm of the
imagination.