For one of my classes this semester we need to read an autobiography and write a paper on it (with certain guidelines). I’m drawing a blank as to anyone who I think would be interesting to read about, so I come seeking suggestions.
I won’t find something involving sports or military or politics interesting, I can tell you that. I’m much more interested in people in the arts or something creative.
Suggest away!
Augusten Burroughs Running With Scissors - I can promise you you won’t be bored. I started a thread on SDMB that has some useful links if you’re interested. (Warning: contains graphic accounts of gay and underage sex and a lot of general weirdness.)
Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest covers his life from birth to ca. 1964. He was a “boy wonder” (along with his archenemy Capote) on the literary scene, a stepbrother of Jackie Kennedy, and good friends with Paul Newman, Tennessee Williams, and other huge names of the 50s.
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt (also a movie, though many sideplots are cut). McCourt grew up almost unimaginably poor in Limerick in the 1930s/40s to parents who were such losers they emigrated from the U.S. to Ireland (their birthplace). Disturbing and depressing but very good.
Confessions of an Opium Eater by Thomas DeQuincey was a hit in the autobiography seminar I stupidly decided to drop. A friend of mine liked it so much she devoted half of her Master’s thesis to it.
You might want to check out one of the following - neither are famous people, but I found their stories to be quite moving.
Hamlet’s Dresser: A Memoir - Bob Smith.
Geisha: A Life - Mineko Iwasaki
Hey, it’s Black History Month - read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography.
Or Ben Franklin. You will not be bored with either.
Regards,
Shodan
Okay, so it was written with Alex Haley, but The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a truly great book.
Cartoonist Bill Mauldin wrote a wonderful autobiography called The Brass Ring. It mostly focuses on his wartime experiences and culminates in General Patton trying to intimidate him into drawing stuff more supportive of the war effort.
Not exactly a good book, but fascinating in its way: Blaze Starr: My Life as Told by Huey Perry is fascinating in its own way. Starr’s quite a storyteller, and she has a charming – and amusing – way of making herself look as good as possible while revealing the, um, fiery side of her temperament. I wish I’d read this book in college when I took that course on autobiographies, because Starr (or Perry) is almost as good at the tease-and-reveal with her life story as she is with her costumes.
Let’s put it this way: If Russ Meyer were a biographer, this would be his finest work.
Also, it’s a quick read.
You said “in the arts,” but you didn’t specify the high arts…
(Is this a camp classic? Because it should be.)
I second Malcolm X, one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read.
For a really interesting autobio of a counter-culture icon, read Flashbacks by Timothy Leary. Leary was an old nut and the book is thoroughly self exonerating and egomaniacal, but he was also an excellent writer and at times wickedly funny.
(If you don’t know who Timothy Leary was, go here.)
The book has an odd structure: the first half consists of alternating chapters, the first of which begins with the suicide of his first wife when he was a 35 year old Harvard professor and the alternating chapters giving the story of his life from birth until that moment. Later the two merge. Every chapter begins with a one paragraph biography of a philosopher, writer, entertainer, artist, etc. who in some way advocated altered states of consciousness.
Highlights include his memoirs of all the great Beat names (Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, etc.), musicians (Maynard Ferguson, John & Yoko, George Harrison, etc.) and weirdos he was friends with or wed to (including Uma Thurman’s mother). Obviously most of the book is settled on the LSD culture of the 60s, but the stranger-than-fiction story of his imprisonment and escape (he was assigned to a minimum security prison based on his performance on a psychological profile test that had been designed by a young Harvard psychologist named… Dr. Timothy Leary) and his exile in Africa and Switzerland is just as interesting.
I abhor Leary and most of his philosophy, but the autobio is a great read.
I recommend Bruce Campbell’s If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. So much fun to read, especially for an Evil Dead aficionado.
If you like sports, try Al Stump’s biography of Ty Cobb, entitled “Cobb”. It’s very interesting reading.
If you want a more positive character, I second the recommendation of Autobiography (or any good biography) of Franklin.
If you want to get cute, Jack Miles’ biography of God is a good book, too.
If you enjoy jazz music, you can try:
“Miles: The Autobiography” co-written with Quincy Troupe
“Beneath the Underdog” by Charles Mingus
and
“As Though I Had Wings” by Chet Baker.
I agree:
Miles (Miles Davis) - with Troupe
Memoirs, by Katherine Graham (publisher of the Washington Post), was terrific. How she went from the rarified, protected air of being the daughter of a Jewish newspaper publisher to the tough, iron-fist in the velvet glove publisher herself is a great story. I enjoyed it so much that I wrote her a brief note. She was gracious enough to write back.
My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber. Very, very funny. Too bad the guy ended up blind, an alcoholic, and one of the meanes sons of bitches ever to walk the face of the earth.
I enjoyed “The Road from Coorain” by Jill Ker Conway. Girl from Australian outback grows up to be president of Smith college. Really engrossing memoir.
Snipped for those who haven’t read it but want to.
I was under the impression this particular book was a work of fiction. I remember being thoroughly engrossed throughout the whole thing, then finding out at the end that the characters never existed (or, more appropriately, were an amalgomation) and being significantly pissed off.
I loved Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. Eli Wiesel’s books Night and Dawn are really short, great reads as well. How about Zlata’s Diary?
I don’t know how you feel about Showgirls, Jade, and Basic Instinct, but screenwriter Joe Eszterhas just wrote Hollywood Animal: A Memoir, mainly about his life in Hollywood but also includes material about his childhood and background.
Dizzy: To Be or Not To Bop - Autobiography of Dizzy Gillespie
And another vote for Malcom X.
I also fifth or sixth (or whatever it is by now) Autobiography of Malcolm X. It’s a fascinating challenge academically because he completely changed his world view while he was writing it. When he came to see his god-like mentor Elijah Muhammad as a corrupt oversexed old charlatan he broke with the Nation of Islam and quickly became the biggest persona non grata in the U.S., hated by the black extremists he had so eloquently voiced and the mainstream he had railed against. He also knew that his days if not his hours were numbered (and, of course, he was right).
Malcolm actually went back over the manuscript after exchanging his racial separatist pseudo-Islamic views for mainstream Islam and softened a few passages. (For example, to a passage about a white foster family that took him in which began “The local church saw them as ‘good people’” he added the simple four words “They were good people”, which completely changed the implications of before; he no longer so whites as inherently evil when he died though he did when he began the dictation.) If you go with this one be sure to read the Playboy interview (May 1963) that began it; the Spike Lee movie is good but very biased (what the hell does the Rodney King beating have to do with Malcolm X?)but a very different film perspective can be found in the final episode of Roots: The Next Generations in which Malcolm is portrayed by Al Freeman, the same actor who portrayed Elijah Muhammad in Lee’s Malcolm X.
A related autobiography is Growing Up X by his daughter Ilyasah Shabazz. (Ilyasah is an Arabic feminization of Elijah; she was named for Elijah Muhammad.) Malcolm died violently in genteel poverty; his pregnant widow soon earned more money in a single year than she’d ever seen in all her years combined. Fearful of her life (understandably so), she used the money to remove herself to White Plains, NY, where her six daughters grew up in a sheltered home with almost exclusively white neighbors and friends and attended an upscale private school. (Malcolm also grew up one of the few black families in a predominantly white region, but that’s about the only comparison you can make between their upbringings.) Ilyasah knew who her father was but most of what she knew about his life and ministry she learned from college courses. (Ilyasah is a bright spot in a family has had more than its share of tragedy in recent years with the death of Malcolm’s widow at the hands of his mentally ill namesake grandson and the implication of another daughter in an attempt to assassinate Farrakhan [whom she believed, backed by much evidence, was conspiratorial in her father’s death.)