Don’t question Angela Davis’ manuscript, Toni Morrison warned her publishing colleagues. Davis was not “Jane Fonda” but, rather, “Jean d’Arc.”
Tag: Autobiography
B-Sides: Satomi Myodo’s “Journey in Search of the Way”
As spiritual autobiographies go, Journey in Search of the Way is a bit of a romp ...
Great Liberations: Writing Beyond the Academy
Bridging scholarly and popular writing is what good essays have always done. ...
Ireland’s Uneasy Monuments
“History,” writes Fergal Keane, “began with my father’s stories.” These were stories of Oliver Cromwell’s murders, of the dead of the Irish Famine, of wars of ...
Charlotte Salomon’s Triumphant “No”
Charlotte Salomon’s short life was haunted—by the rise of the Nazis, who ultimately took her life, but also by her family’s history of severe mental illness ...
Swinging: The Double Life of Anaïs Nin
In 1937, Henry Miller predicted that the autobiographical oeuvre of Anaïs Nin would one day “take its place beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius ...
The Last Rock Star?
The most vivid passages of Born to Run recall a childhood that the author seems to have recognized as lost to him almost as soon as he could form a memory of it. Bruce Springsteen grew up “pretty …