Biography & Memoir.

Thomas De Quincey’s strange and influential memoir of addiction, dream-life, and Romantic prose remains one of the nineteenth century’s most uncanny autobiographical classics.

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Rousseau’s Confessions is a foundational autobiographical classic of self-examination and Enlightenment thought.

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John Austin Stevens’s Albert Gallatin offers a concise portrait of a major American statesman and diplomat.

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Frederick Douglass expands his life story into a powerful autobiographical indictment of slavery, tracing violence, resistance, education, escape, and the making of a public voice.

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Charles Beresford recalls a life spanning the late Victorian and Edwardian Royal Navy, from sea service and colonial campaigns to a public career in Parliament.

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Plutarch's celebrated parallel biographies of the great figures of Greece and Rome.

$7.50

Frank Everett Stevens's detailed history of the 1832 Black Hawk War, with an account of the Sauk leader Black Hawk's life.

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The first volume of a nineteenth-century study of the women who inspired the poets: portraits of the muses and beloveds celebrated in verse, from the age of the troubadours onward.

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A stirring nineteenth-century narrative of faith put into practice, recounting a life and ministry sustained, its author held, entirely through prayer.

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A first-person memoir tracing the arc of a life from its beginnings onward.

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A classic study of Geoffrey de Mandeville and the anarchy of King Stephen's reign, using one turbulent baron's career to illuminate a chaotic chapter of medieval England.

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An early family biography of Jane Austen, drawing on her surviving letters to trace the quiet life behind the novels and the woman who wrote them.

$8.50

A first-person memoir told in the author's own voice, recounting a remarkable life and the struggles, convictions, and events that shaped it.

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The second volume of a life told largely through the letters of a leading Royal Navy commander of the Napoleonic wars.

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The vivid, troubling first-hand narrative of a nineteenth-century adventurer's years in the Atlantic slave trade.

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A historical study of William Pitt the Younger and Britain's recovery and resurgence under his leadership.

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Julia Cartwright's graceful biography brings to life Beatrice d'Este, the brilliant young Duchess of Milan whose short career sat at the dazzling, dangerous centre of the Italian R

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An insider's sweeping memoir of Napoleon Bonaparte, tracing his rise from soldier to emperor and his fall, drawn from close personal acquaintance with one of history's most consequ

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Solomon Northup's searing 1853 memoir: a free Black man from New York, lured south and kidnapped into slavery in Louisiana, endures twelve years in bondage before his desperate str

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First-person testimony of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, preserving in their own words the experience of bondage, resistance and the long reach toward freedom in America.

$8.00

Louise Imogen Guiney's A Little English Gallery gathers graceful literary portraits of Lady Danvers, Henry Vaughan, George Farquhar, Beauclerk and Langton, and William Hazlitt.

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Hamlin Garland's Pulitzer-winning memoir of prairie life, family, and hard-won artistic ambition, a warm, clear-eyed portrait of the American Midwest and the people who shaped it.

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A retelling of the crusading English king, his wars in the Holy Land and his legend of chivalry, aimed at readers who love medieval history and heroic biography.

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Thomas Carlyle's admiring life of the great German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, with a searching study of his plays, poetry, and thought.

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Booker T.

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Sir Walter Scott's private journal, printed from the manuscript at Abbotsford, is one of the great diaries in English, candid, courageous and moving as the celebrated novelist face

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A biography of Charles Frohman, the great American theatrical producer who shaped Broadway and the London stage before his death aboard the Lusitania.

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A biography of Edward VII, the long-waiting heir who became king and gave his name to an age.

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William H.

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Diogenes Laertius's rich compendium of the lives, sayings and doctrines of the ancient Greek philosophers.

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The candid memoirs of Babur, founder of the Mughal empire, in English translation.

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The classic fictionalised memoir of a legendary Wall Street speculator, still revered as one of the wisest books ever written about markets, trading psychology, and the eternal fol

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A Boer general's firsthand account of the South African War, written by a commander who fought the British in the field and lived to set the campaign down in his own plain, unflinc

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An intimate memoir of the poet Lord Byron by one who knew him closely, drawing on personal memory and the testimony of others who shared his life.

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton looks back across a long life at the center of the fight for women's rights.

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A biographical reference gathering the lives of notable Canadians.

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A biography of Harriet Martineau, the pioneering nineteenth-century writer, social theorist and reformer, tracing the life and work of one of the first women to make a public caree

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A biography of Willard Glazier, Civil War cavalryman, prisoner, escapee, author, and explorer.

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A historical study of Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror and Duke of Normandy, whose turbulent life and rivalry over the English succession shaped the Anglo-Norma

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Ulysses S.

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The complete diary of Samuel Pepys, an incomparably vivid, gossipy and honest record of London in the 1660s, from plague and Great Fire to the small daily pleasures of an ambitious

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John Henry Newman's celebrated spiritual autobiography, tracing with candour and eloquence the long development of his religious opinions and his path toward Rome.

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A brisk American memoir of enterprise and hard graft, recounting two decades of the itinerant salesman's life — the roads, the deals, the setbacks and the pluck that carried them t

$9.50

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's landmark of literary autobiography and criticism, blending the story of his intellectual life with profound reflections on poetry, imagination, and philos

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A biography of Susan B.

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A scholarly inquiry into the relations, ancestry and descendants of William Shakespeare, patiently sifting parish records, wills and documents to reconstruct the ordinary family th

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Paramahansa Yogananda's celebrated spiritual autobiography, a luminous account of a life devoted to yoga, meditation, and the search for God, and the book that introduced millions

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Bernal Díaz del Castillo, an old soldier of Cortés, recounts the conquest of Mexico as he lived it, this first volume opening one of history's great firsthand adventure narratives.

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A biography of Emily Brontë, the fiercely private author of Wuthering Heights, seeking the life and inner world behind one of English literature's most singular and enigmatic imagi

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The life of José Rizal, the Philippines' national hero, drawn largely from his own words: the memories, reflections and testimony of the writer and patriot whose ideas helped awake

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Oscar Wilde’s long prison letter turns suffering, memory, vanity, love, humiliation, and spiritual reckoning into one of the most searching autobiographical works in English.

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Harriet Jacobs's searing first-person account of enslavement, escape, and seven years hidden in a cramped attic.

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Timothy Dexter's gloriously eccentric self-published tract, famous for its erratic spelling and absent punctuation, which the author supplied by the page for readers to insert them

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The private letters of Napoleon Bonaparte to Josephine trace one of history's most famous relationships from passionate ardor to estrangement, offering an intimate view of the empe

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A substantial devotional study of the life and mission of Jesus, drawing on scripture to present his ministry, teaching and significance.

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Suetonius's gossipy, unforgettable portraits of Julius Caesar and the first eleven emperors, packed with scandal, omen and telling detail from the heart of imperial Rome.

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One of the first slave narratives written by a formerly enslaved African, Equiano's 1789 memoir carried a captive from West Africa across the Atlantic to freedom, print, and the fi

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Austin Bidwell's own account of the great Bank of England forgery and the fifteen years of imprisonment that followed.

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The intimate letters of the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to her American lover Gilbert Imlay.

$8.00

Frederick Douglass's electrifying account of his life in bondage and his fight to be free.

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Benjamin Franklin's classic account of his own life, from humble beginnings to fame as a printer, inventor, and statesman.

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Mark Twain's rich memoir of learning the great river as a steamboat pilot, then returning years later to find both the Mississippi and America transformed.

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Augustine of Hippo turns his life into a prayer, tracing a restless soul from youthful appetite to faith.

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The life of one of the most fearless reformers of his age, a champion of free thought and free speech who fought his way into public life.

$9.00

Audre Lorde's groundbreaking memoir, which she called a biomythography, weaves memory and myth to tell the story of a Black lesbian poet coming into herself in mid-century America.

$15.95

Maggie Nelson's genre-crossing memoir braids queer love, pregnancy and gender transition with sharp philosophical inquiry, making a fierce, tender case for a life that refuses easy

$15.95