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Autobiography and Memoir

Autobiography and Memoir news and analysis from The Nation

  • February 5, 2004

    A Faithful Servant

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

    Ian Williams

  • January 8, 2004

    A Magical Realist and His Reality

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

    Perry Anderson

  • November 20, 2003

    Murder, She Wrote

    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.

    Kera Bolonik

  • November 20, 2003

    Memoirs of a Revolutionist

    Who can recall the late Stokely Carmichael’s first name and not associate it with the two most incendiary words of the 1960s, Black Power?

    Norman Kelley

  • October 23, 2003

    Starting Out in the ’50s

    The best memoirs of recent years reveal “The Way We Live Now” as well as or better than most contemporary fiction.

    Dan Wakefield

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  • August 28, 2003

    The Life of the Party

    Interesting Times is a curiously feeble title for an autobiography, rather as if Noam Chomsky were to write an article called "Could America Do Better?" It carries, of course, the sting

    Terry Eagleton

  • June 26, 2003

    Our Man in Jazz

    Not many people can say they changed the world and make it stick. In Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, George Wein does.

    Gene Santoro

  • June 26, 2003

    Secrets and Lies

    You would hope that the passage of fifty years might have cleared the passions that once inflamed the Rosenberg case.

    Philip Weiss

  • June 26, 2003

    The Everything Expert

    Toward the end of his memoir, My Brother’s Keeper, Amitai Etzioni recounts meeting with the political consultant Dick Morris.

    Robert S. Boynton

  • June 5, 2003

    The Believer

    A reader knowing nothing of the 1990s might well come away from Sidney Blumenthal’s lengthy account of The Clinton Wars with the impression that for eight years, Bill and Hillary Clinton

    Tom Wicker

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