autobiography of newspaper in english

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Essay on Autobiography of a Newspaper for Students of All Ages

Essay on Autobiography of a Newspaper is a unique and insightful piece, you will have the chance to hear directly from a newspaper, as it recounts its journey through the world of journalism.

With a voice that is both informative and personal, our narrator tells the story of how it came to be a trusted source of news and information for countless readers. From its early days as a small local paper to its current role as a major news outlet, our protagonist shares the joys and challenges of its long and storied existence.

Along the way, our newspaper grapples with the ethical responsibilities that come with reporting the news, and reflects on the impact that its stories have had on the lives of its readers. It explores the complex emotions that come with being the bearer of both good and bad news, and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the media.

Through its compelling narrative, “Autobiography of a Newspaper” offers a fresh and thought-provoking perspective on the role that journalism plays in our society. So come along for the ride, and experience the world of news reporting from a whole new angle.

Autobiography of a Newspaper

Greetings, I am the Newspaper, a chronicler of history and a witness to the events that have shaped the world. I have been in circulation for centuries, bearing witness to the triumphs and tragedies of humanity.

I was born at a time when the world was changing rapidly, a time when the power of the printed word was being harnessed to inform, educate, and inspire. My first pages were filled with stories of war, revolution, and great change, and I have continued to be at the forefront of the flow of information ever since.

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Justin Morgan

Autobiography of a Newspaper 100-150-500-1000 Words

This is an Autobiography of a Newspaper. There are 4 autobiographies of 100, 150, 500 & 1000 words respectively.

These autobiographies are a chronicle of three reputable newspapers each with its unique journey through India’s history. The Times of India, Hindustan Times, and The Indian Express have all played pivotal roles in shaping the nation’s narrative. They reflect its triumphs and challenges and evolve alongside a changing India. Do you know how newspapers are produced ? Anyway, let’s begin the autobiographies.

Table of Contents

Autobiography of a Newspaper in 1000 Words

I was born in the heart of India, in the bustling city of Mumbai. It was on a crisp morning in December 1947. The air was thick with hope and optimism as the nation had just gained its independence. As the printing press roared to life for the very first time, I, “The Indian Chronicle,” came into existence.

In those early days, I was a modest publication. I was a mere whisper amidst the cacophony of voices in the Indian media landscape. My pages were limited and my resources were scarce. However, the spirit of freedom and the commitment of my founders fueled me to become a beacon of truth. I became a chronicler of India’s journey as an independent nation.

My infancy was marked by a struggle for identity. I was just a small publication in a sea of newspapers. But I was determined to make my mark. With each edition, I sought to capture the essence of post-independence India. I covered stories of nation-building, the struggles of a newly independent India and the dreams of a better tomorrow.

My reporters ventured into remote villages and crowded urban slums. They penned stories of ordinary Indians who were striving for a better life. I told their tales amplifying their voices to reach the ears of those in power. These early years laid the foundation for becoming an unwavering advocate for the common people.

As the years rolled on, I evolved. My pages grew in number, and my reach extended far beyond Mumbai. I became a voice for the voiceless covering issues like poverty, education and social justice. I championed the causes that mattered to the common people. Moreover, I advocated for their rights and aspirations.

In the 1960s, I played a central role in spreading awareness about the Green Revolution. It transformed India’s agriculture. It also helped India to achieve self-sufficiency in food production. I celebrated the success stories of farmers who were at the forefront of this revolution. I ensured that their toil and dedication were acknowledged.

The 70s and 80s brought sweeping changes to India. I covered political upheavals, economic reforms and technological advancements. My reporters were on the front lines. They documented the transformation of our nation into a global powerhouse.

During this era, I reported on India’s first successful satellite launch signaling its entry into the space age. I marvelled at the achievements of scientists and engineers who made this milestone possible. My pages were filled with stories of innovation and progress. India continued to assert itself on the world stage.

The path to success was not without obstacles. I faced censorship, financial crises, and fierce competition. But I persevered. My commitment to honest journalism and unwavering support from my readers kept me afloat.

In the face of censorship, my journalists displayed unparalleled courage. They risked their lives to uncover the truth and expose corruption. My dedication to investigative reporting was unwavering. It often led to positive changes in society. For instance, a series of investigative articles in the 1980s brought to light a major corruption scandal that eventually led to the prosecution of several influential politicians.

The 21st century is directed at the digital age. I embraced it wholeheartedly. I launched my website. And I reached readers worldwide. Social media became my ally. They helped me connect with a younger and tech-savvy audience.

The digital revolution allowed me to provide real-time updates on breaking news. This makes me a trusted source of information during times of crisis. Whether it was reporting on natural disasters, political developments or global events, I was always at the forefront. I deliver accurate and timely news to my readers.

Throughout my journey, I realized the immense power of journalism. I exposed corruption and held those in power accountable. Then I was not just a newspaper. I was a beacon of truth and a catalyst for change.

One of the proudest moments in my history was the role I played in advocating for gender equality . In a society where women often face discrimination and violence, I dedicated special sections to highlighting the achievements of women from all walks of life. I celebrated their successes in fields such as politics, science, sports and the arts. I inspired a new generation of girls to dream big and shatter glass ceilings.

My stories inspired change. I saw slums turning into neighbourhoods, schools replacing illiteracy and women breaking barriers in every field. Happily, I celebrated the achievements of my nation and its people.

I also played a significant role in disaster relief efforts. When natural calamities struck, I launched campaigns to raise funds and provide aid to those in need. My readers responded with generosity. We helped countless individuals rebuild their lives.

Today, as I pen down my autobiography, I look back with pride at the journey of “The Indian Chronicle.” I am no longer just a newspaper. I am a legacy, a symbol of resilience and journalism.

In the digital age, I continue to adapt and evolve. My commitment to truth remains unwavering. I am ready to face the challenges of the future. With the support of my dedicated team and loyal readers, I am confident that “The Indian Chronicle” will continue to shine. I am and shall continue to be a voice for the marginalized and a source of inspiration for generations to come.

I owe my existence and success to the countless individuals who have contributed to “The Indian Chronicle” over the years. To my dedicated journalists, tireless editors and loyal readers, I extend my heartfelt gratitude. Together, we have woven a tapestry of stories that have shaped the destiny of a nation.

As I close the pages of my autobiography, I do so with a sense of fulfilment. From my humble beginnings in Mumbai to becoming a trusted source of information across India, my journey has been nothing short of extraordinary. I hope that my story serves as a reminder that even the humblest of entities can make a profound impact on the world. Thank you for being a part of my incredible journey.

Autobiography of a Newspaper 500 words

In the tumultuous year of 1932, amid the whirlwind across British India, I, The Indian Express, was born. My creators, Ramnath Goenka and the visionary G. Narayana envisioned a newspaper that would stand as a pioneer of truth, fearlessly illuminating the nation’s path towards independence.

As India’s struggle for independence gained momentum, I became the fervent voice of the masses. My pages echoed the calls for freedom. I was reporting on the heroic deeds of leaders like Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. The ink on my pages bore witness to the sacrifices and triumphs of a nation yearning for self-rule.

The year 1947 marked a watershed moment in my existence. I reported on the heartbreaking Partition of India. The stories of displacement, loss and anguish filled my pages. Yet, amid the darkness, I continued to uphold the ideals of unity and hope for a better future.

In the post-independence era, my role evolved. I became a guide. I chronicled India’s efforts to build a democratic and diverse society. From the framing of the Constitution to the early years of nation-building, I played my part in shaping the nation’s narrative.

The winds of change blew once more in the 1990s as India embarked on economic liberalization. I adapted to the new era. I started reporting on economic reforms and their impact on the nation. The digital age dawned and I ventured into the realm of online journalism. I gained the power of reaching readers beyond the confines of print.

In the 21st century, I expanded my reach. I am connected with a global audience. My coverage extended beyond borders. I provide insights into India’s role on the world stage. I became a trusted source for international readers seeking to understand the complexities of the Indian subcontinent.

Throughout my journey, one thing remained constant. That was my unwavering commitment to truth and journalistic integrity. I braved censorship, adversity and challenges to uphold the values that guided my founders.

As I pen my autobiography, I look to the future with optimism. The Indian Express continues to adapt and embrace technology. It would stay true to its mission of providing unbiased and thought-provoking journalism. In a rapidly changing world, I remain a symbol of journalistic excellence. I am dedicated to serving India and the world with the power of the written word.

In those pages, you will find the stories that shaped a nation. You will find the struggles and triumphs of a people and the legacy of a newspaper that has stood the test of time. My journey is an ever-evolving saga. I invite you to explore it through these ink-stained chronicles.

Autobiography of a Newspaper 150 words

I am the Times of India, a newspaper. I have borne witness to the ever-evolving tapestry of India’s history and society. My journey began in 1838, during the British colonial era, as a humble weekly publication. Over the decades, I transformed. I adapt to the changing needs of my readers.

In the struggle for India’s independence, I became a powerful voice. I rallied for freedom through my pages. I witnessed the pain of Partition and the birth of two nations. But firmly I reported stories of courage and heartbreak.

As India progressed post-independence, I kept pace. I evolved into a daily newspaper. My pages showcased the country’s achievements in science, arts and culture. I reported on momentous events like the economic liberalization of the 1990s and the digital revolution of the 21st century.

Through the years, I embraced technology. I transitioned from print to digital, ensuring my presence in the digital age. With millions of readers worldwide, I continued to inform and inspire.

My autobiography is an emblem of journalism in the face of change. I remain committed to serving as a sign of truth and knowledge in the land of diversity and dreams like India.

Autobiography of a Newspaper 100 words

I am the Hindustan Times. I am an enduring tale etched in ink across the pages of India’s history. My journey began in 1924 as a humble voice. I strove to illuminate minds in the dawn of a new India.

It was the tumultuous decades of colonial rule. I lent my voice to the nation’s aspirations for freedom. Then India achieved independence in 1947. I transformed into a trusted source of truth. I reported on the challenges and triumphs of a young republic.

Over time, I embraced digital evolution. I ensure my stories reach far and wide. My autobiography reflects the ever-changing India through the lens of ink and impact.

Thank you for reading the autobiography of a newspaper. You can also read-

Autobiography of a Book
Autobiography of a Coin
Autobiography of a River
Autobiography of a Tree
Autobiography of a Bicycle
Autobiography of a Car
Autobiography of a Shoe
Autobiography of a Dog
Autobiography of a Tiger

To write an autobiography for a book, follow these steps: 1. Begin with a captivating introduction. 2. Organize your life story chronologically. 3. Share personal reflections and insights. 4. Highlight key life events and milestones. 5. Describe influential people and their impact. 6. Identify themes or life lessons. 7. Be honest and vulnerable. 8. Choose a suitable writing style. 9. Edit and revise for clarity. 10. Conclude with a thoughtful reflection.

An autobiography typically includes details about the author’s life, starting with their early years, highlighting significant events, influential people, personal reflections, life lessons, struggles and character development. It’s written in the author’s unique style and concludes with a reflective summary.

Three highly regarded three autobiographies are: 1. “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank. 2. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. 3. “Long Walk to Freedom” by Nelson Mandela.

Well done, dear reader. What should the topic of my next autobiography be? Please share your viewpoint in the comment section below.

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MLA 8TH EDITION
Neuman, Shirley and Susan Jackel. "Autobiographical Writing in English". The Canadian Encyclopedia , 16 December 2013, Historica Canada . www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/autobiographical-writing-in-english. Accessed 01 April 2024.
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APA 6TH EDITION
Neuman, S., & Jackel, S. (2013). Autobiographical Writing in English. In The Canadian Encyclopedia . Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/autobiographical-writing-in-english
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CHICAGO 17TH EDITION
Neuman, Shirley , and Susan Jackel. "Autobiographical Writing in English." The Canadian Encyclopedia . Historica Canada. Article published February 07, 2006; Last Edited December 16, 2013.
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TURABIAN 8TH EDITION
The Canadian Encyclopedia , s.v. "Autobiographical Writing in English," by Shirley Neuman, and Susan Jackel, Accessed April 01, 2024, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/autobiographical-writing-in-english
The Canadian Encyclopedia , s.v. "Autobiographical Writing in English," by Shirley Neuman, and Susan Jackel, Accessed April 01, 2024, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/autobiographical-writing-in-english" href="#" class="js-copy-clipboard b b-md b-invert b-modal-copy">Copy

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Autobiographical Writing in English

Article by Shirley Neuman , Susan Jackel

Published Online February 7, 2006

Last Edited December 16, 2013

Letters, journals, diaries, memoirs and autobiographies are all ways of saying to the reader, "I was there." Although differing in many ways, these forms are alike in having an authoritative "I" who recounts events and impressions experienced amid a specific social context, and a "there" that can be readily located in time and space. Because they speak in such personal tones, these records and narratives are rich in human interest. Social and intellectual historians find them especially valuable sources, and they are increasingly studied by literary historians and critics as well.

Journals, Diaries and Letters: The Lost Arts

The circumstances of colonial life particularly favoured the writing of journals, diaries and letters. Explorers, fur traders, missionaries, surveyors, government officials and army and law-enforcement officers were all obliged by their superiors to keep daily records of their work ( see Exploration Literature: Travel Literature ; Exploration and Travel Literature in French ).

Emigrants and travellers, especially women, wrote long letters home to their families and friends, and many kept diaries and journals. Although seldom written with publication in mind, these documents occasionally reached print because they contained information and commentary of use or interest to a wider readership. Written on the spot, they are a treasure trove for historians seeking to reconstruct the daily lives of private individuals.

Literary scholars recognize in them a means by which newcomers to Canada practised putting into words whatever they found new and noteworthy in the landscape, climate, inhabitants, institutions, customs or speech of British North America. Although all 3 forms are now almost lost arts, the journals, diaries and letters of earlier generations of Canadians are becoming increasingly available in modern editions and reprints.

Memoirs and Autobiographies

By contrast, memoirs and autobiographies continue to appear regularly. Unlike letters and diaries, they view events in retrospect and are often written with publication and posterity in mind. These works are more limited in historical reliability - the writer will have forgotten or suppressed a good deal - but the author has greater opportunities for achieving a shaped and finished narrative.

Memoirs are more loosely constructed than autobiographies, and reveal more of external circumstances than of inner development. Often appearing under the simple title Memoirs or a variant ( Recollections , Reminiscences , Forty Years in ... ), they are characteristically anecdotal and episodic, with the focus dispersed among the many interesting people and places the writer has known.

Autobiography, on the other hand, downplays the context and highlights the unfolding drama of self-knowledge and growth, thus drawing in the literary critic, who analyses the autobiography's projection of a narrative persona, the deployment of dramatic, descriptive and narrative skills, and the achievement of structure, pattern or design in the whole.

A cluster of books describing Upper Canada [Ontario] before 1850 shows all these forms in their characteristic 19th-century guises. Elizabeth Simcoe , wife of Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, kept a diary from 1791 to 1796 that was published in 1911 and then re-edited in 1956 by Mary Quayle Innis as Mrs. Simcoe's Diary . Describing life in official circles at York [Toronto], it is at a far remove from Our Forest Home (1889), based on the letters and journals of Irish emigrant Frances Stewart, who settled in the 1820s on the Otonabee River near Peterborough.

Among Stewart's neighbours were Samuel Strickland, author of Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West (1853), and his more famous sisters, Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie . Traill's letters to her family in England were published as The Backwoods of Canada in 1836 for the information of intended middle-class British emigrants; it is now one of the classics of Canadian literature.

Moodie wrote autobiographically of her years of Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and her later Life in the Clearings (1853). The British author and feminist Anna Jameson visited her attorney general husband in York and then used her journals as the basis for Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), giving the observations and opinions of a sophisticated and adventurous visitor.

Other times and places yield their quota of firsthand accounts. Labrador is the scene for journals by Captain George Cartwright (1911), recollections by Lambert de Boileau (1861) and Captain Nicholas Smith (1937), and autobiographies by Sir Wilfred Grenfell ( A Labrador Doctor , 1919; Forty Years for Labrador , 1932) and Elizabeth Goudie ( Woman of Labrador , 1973). Colonel William Baird recorded his Seventy Years of New Brunswick Life (1890) but was overtopped by New Brunswick Baptist minister Joshua N. Barnes in Lights and Shadows of Eighty Years (1911). Sir Andrew Macphail 's The Master's Wife (1939) is a polished and memorable vignette of Prince Edward Island life in the later part of the 19th century.

Travel Narratives

Travel and adventure in the North and West have likewise proved fertile themes. Accounts by fur traders include John McLean 's Notes of a Twenty-five Years' Service (1849) and P.H. Godsell's Arctic Trader (1934). Missionary work lies behind the letters and journal of Charlotte Selina Bompas, edited in 1929 by S.A. Archer as A Heroine of the North , and memoirs in 5 volumes by Methodist John C. McDougall , including Pathfinding on Plain and Prairie (1898) and In the Days of the Red River Rebellion (1903). Early mounted policemen of a reminiscent bent include John G. Donkin ( Trooper and Redskin in the Far Northwest , 1889) and Colonel Sam Steele , who wrote of his Mountie days and much else in Forty Years in Canada (1915). Of many Klondike books, 2 that stand out are Martha Louise Black's My Ninety Years (1976; first published in 1938 as My Seventy Years ) and Laura B. Berton's I Married the Klondike (1954).

More recent travel writing about the North includes Joanne Ronan Moore's Nahanni Trailhead (1980), one of the many about the Nahanni, and David Pelly's Expedition (1981), in which he retraces his ancestor's trip to the Arctic. David McFadden in A Trip Around Lake Erie (1980) and A Trip Around Lake Huron (1980) domesticates the travel narrative as the account of a family camping trip which makes the occasion for a meditation on Canadian identity. If personal travel narratives have all but disappeared from contemporary Canadian writing, the few that are still published tend to be about travels outside Canada and are often written by poets and novelists. This is a trend prefigured by Sara Jeanette Duncan in The Crow's Nest , her autobiographical account of travelling with her husband in the British civil service in India. More recently, George Woodcock 's South Sea Journey (1976), which emerged out of his script for a CBC documentary, takes up the theme of travel outside of Canada, while P.K. Page's Brazilian Journal records some of her years as a diplomat's wife in South America. Gwendolyn MacEwen in Mermaids and Ikons: A Greek Summer (1978), George Galt in Trailing Pythagoras (1982) and, most radically, Daphne Marlatt in Zócalo have joined to a travel account a personal quest narrative more typical of the plot of autobiography.

Homestead Accounts

Homesteading on the Prairies generated dozens of first-person settlers' accounts and memoirs. Mary Georgina Hall wrote letters home describing A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba (1884), and E.A. Gill told of his days as A Manitoba Chore Boy (1912). Wheat and Woman (1914) is Georgina Binnie-Clark's self-portrait as a woman grain farmer in Saskatchewan. In his Northwest of 16 (1958) J.G. MacGregor describes growing up on the Alberta frontier; the journals and letters of Sarah Ellen Roberts, whose family also homesteaded in Alberta, were edited for publication by Latham Roberts under 2 titles, Of Us and the Oxen (1968, Canadian ed) and Alberta Homestead (1971, US ed). An unusual and striking story is contained in the letters of Hilda Rose, written from near Fort Vermilion, Alta, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1927 and issued as The Stump Farm a year later. Monica Storrs's letters, edited by W.L. Morton (1979), describe the settling of the Peace River district, while Susan Allison's A Pioneer Gentlewoman in British Columbia (1976) describes early ranching in the Similkameen. Gilbert Roe's Getting the Know How (1982) documents with precise detail early railroading a well as homesteading. Homesteader (1972), the title James M. Minifie chose for his recollections of a Saskatchewan boyhood, speaks for an entire genre.

The Unknown and Unsung

Although the majority of autobiographers and memoirists have some other, previously established, claim to fame, a few have written in the role of spokespersons for the unknown and unsung. G.H. Westbury published Misadventures of a Working Hobo in Canada in 1930, just as the Great Depression began to make hoboes of many men. Saints, Devils, and Ordinary Seamen (1946) were the subjects of memoirs by Lieutenant W.H. Pugsley, while Norman B. James made his mark in history with his Autobiography of a Nobody (1947). Phyllis Knight, through tape recording and editing by her son Rolf, has shown us the extraordinary dimensions of A Very Ordinary Life (1974). Maria Campbell's moving story in Halfbreed (1973) represents a side of Canadian life too little known or understood; in The Book of Jessica (1989) actress Linda Griffiths narrates the tensions and issues of racism around her theatrical performance developed from Campbell's autobiography. Jane Willis Geneish writes one of several accounts of residential schooling in An Indian Girlhood (1973). Other native writers, including Lee Maracle in Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel (1975; extensively rev 1990) and Beverly Hungry Wolf in The Ways of My Grandmothers (1980), significantly adapt the conventions of autobiography to reflect native concepts of self in relation to the community. Much contemporary Inuit writing takes the form of autobiography, often in English: Alice French's My Name is Masak (1976) provides another account of residential schooling, Minnie Aodla Freeman writes of Life Among the Qallunaat (1978) and Lydia Campbell writes at the interface of Inuit and other settler cultures in Sketch of Labrador Life by a Labrador Woman (1984). Other Inuit autobiography, such as I, Nuligak (1966), have been translated into English and some, such as Anthony Apakark Thrasher's Skid Row Eskimo (1976) or Life Lived Like a Story (1994) - the latter recounting the life stories of 3 women elders from the Yukon and edited by anthropologist Julia Cruikshank - are the product of collaboration between journalists or anthropologists working from taped interviews.

The Political Memoir

Prime ministers occasionally write memoirs, but seldom autobiographies; their private letters and diaries are often useful correctives to their "official" selves that appear in state papers. Two volumes of Robert Borden 's Memoirs were published in 1938; John G. Diefenbaker 's One Canada appeared in 1975. Lester B. Pearson 's Mike (3 vols, 1972-75) is autobiographical, although the last 2 volumes were ghostwritten after his death. Affectionately Yours (1969), edited by J.K. Johnson, is an attractive little collection of letters by, and occasionally to, Sir John A. Macdonald .

The diaries of Prime Minister Mackenzie King , running to many volumes, have raised more questions than they answer. But the "inside story" provided by slightly lesser lights in politics and public life can entertain and inform; witness Judy LaMarsh 's Memoirs of a Bird in a Gilded Cage (1968). Politicians, civil servants and soldiers with long careers tend to ruminate over many volumes with considerable tendency to self-justification; among the most important and credible of such memoirs are Paul Martin 's A Very Public Life (1983-85) and Hugh Keenleyside 's memoirs (1981-82). Charles Ritchie proved that superb diarists are not altogether extinct: The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad was published in 1974, to be followed by An Appetite for Life (1977), Diplomatic Passport (1981) and Storm Signals (1983).

World War II produced a suprisingly limited number of autobiographies and memoirs and a few journal accounts; most of these are by immigrants to Canada who survived the Holocaust or by people who suffered unusual imprisonments. Exemplary among these is the diary Henry Kreisel kept as an adolescent during his internment in a Maritime camp as an "enemy alien" (1975; Another Country 1985), and 2 accounts of suviving concentration camps, Eva Brewster's Vanished in Darkness (1984) and Anita Mayer's One Who Came Back (1981). Peggy Abkhazi in A Curious Cage (1981) gives a rare acccount of internment of "enemy subjects" by the Japanese in Shanghai, while Takeao Nakano, in Within the Barbed Wire Fence (1980) tells of Canadian internment of the Japanese.

In the context of changing social concerns foregrounded by the feminist movement, recent autobiographical narratives have for the first time addressed issues of childhood sexual abuse. Sylvia Fraser traces the impact of such abuse on her life and writing in My Father's House (1987), while Liza Potvin contextualizes the abuse she experienced in terms of her family's Catholicism and her mother's refusal to see what was going on in White Lies (for my mother) (1992). Among such accounts, Elly Danica's Don't , an account of the most extreme abuse and child prostitution, has proven most compelling to survivors of sexual abuse, partly because of the intensity with which its prose conveys the child's anguish.

Insight into the Artist's Iconography

Canadian performing and creative artists have written few substantial autobiographies. Harry Adaskin has given us 2 volumes of memoirs, of which the first, A Fiddler's World (1977) contemplates his childhood and vocation as a musician. Raymond Massey has also written 2 volumes of theatre memoirs (1976, 1979) which are rather superficial in their theatrical account but are again of interest regarding his childhood and regarding other Massey family members. Among the liveliest of the memoirs of Canada's film and television personalities are those by Harry Rasky (1980) and Andrew Allen (1974). Humphrey Carver, British-educated artist turned Canadian landscape designer and urban planner, provides a detailed, analytic look at the environmental issues around his career in Compassionate Landscape (1975). Someone With Me: The Autobiography of William Kurelek (1980) documents nervous breakdown and recovery through religious conversion and provides insight into the artist's iconography; John Davenall Turner has given us a promising beginning to an autobiography he was unable to complete in Sunfield Painter (1982). Two Canadian artists turned to writing late in their careers. Emily Carr , one of Canada's best-known painters, found a style distinctively her own in her sketches The Book of Small (1942), her autobiography Growing Pains (1946) and her journal Hundreds and Thousands (1966) as she had in her painting. New England-born painter Mary Meigs personifies herself as a Virginia Woolf character in her Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait (1981); she would continue her autobiographical enterprise in The Medusa Head (1983) and The Box Closet , also published in the 1980s.

Literate and shapely autobiographies often rest on long years of practice in prose writing. Journalists such as James M. Minifie and Grattan O'Leary ( Recollections of People, Press, and Politics , 1977) have the fluency and wit of professionals. Florence Bird is another longtime journalist and public figure with an important story to tell; the fact that she tells it under the title Anne Francis, An Autobiography (1974) will confuse some younger Canadians until they read her book.

Knowlton Nash in History on the Run (1984) writes about his Washington years with some analytic depth; James Gray's Troublemaker! (1978) describes Canadian social history and newspaper politics; Bruce Hutchison writes a more personal memoir of his years as a journalist in The Far Side of the Street (1976). More recently, publisher and freelance writer Douglas Fetherling has written of the 1960s youth culture in Canada in Travels by Night (1994) and Globe and Mail art and architecture critic John Bentley Mays has published a revealing account of his depression (1995).

Scholars read and write a good deal, but like prime ministers they are generally too discreet to lay bare their inmost thoughts and feelings in autobiography. Notable exceptions are historian Arthur Lower, with My First Seventy-Five Years (1967) and Victoria College's Kathleen Coburn, who, while disclaiming autobiographical intent, nevertheless charts a fascinating course in In Pursuit of Coleridge (1977).

On the whole, however, Canadian scholars have not used autobiography in a way that reflects the complexity or range of their experience, with the notable exception of John Kenneth Galbraith, who in A Life in Our Times (1981) manages to convey something of his career while being wickedly funny about both his early education at the Ontario Agricultural College and about Princeton University.

There are several once-popular Canadian authors who have written autobiographies that seem more durable than their poetry and fiction. James Oliver Curwood and Ralph Connor (Charles W. Gordon ) sold millions of copies of their novels in the early 20th century; Curwood's Son of the Forests was published in 1930, Gordon's Postscript to Adventure in 1938, shortly after his death. Nellie McClung , although now best known for her early feminist activism, first made her name as a writer of stories. Her 2 volumes of autobiography, Clearing in the West (1935) and The Stream Runs Fast (1945), convey a warm and attractive personality.

Laura Goodman Salverson was an Icelandic-born novelist who won a Governor General's Award for her 1939 autobiography Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter , and Frederick Niven 's reflections on his life in Coloured Spectacles (1938) have more artistry and interest than his long historical novels. Edna Jacque's popular verse is no longer read but her account of her trials in Uphill All the Way (1977) now interest those seeking information about Canada's working-class women.

It seems probable, however, that Stephen Leacock 's The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946) will always rank below his satiric sketches, and poet Robert Service added nothing to his fast-dimming lustre in Ploughman of the Moon (1945) and Harper of Heaven (1948). Similarly Thomas Raddall's In My Time (1976) is good deal more pedestrian than his novels, and Earle Birney's Spreading Time (1980) is an account of literary feuds that trivializes his poetic achievement. Whether Mazo de la Roche will be remembered for her novels, her autobiography, Ringing the Changes (1957), both, or neither, is for posterity to decide. These authors and hundreds more Canadians have put it on record that, like Edith Tyrrell in 1938, I Was There , and in so doing they have added imaginative texture and depth to Canadian prose writing.

The Category of Fiction

It is generally assumed that autobiographers, having chosen to tell their life stories, may write selectively and with some dramatic colouring, but will not deliberately mislead the reader as to essential facts. Thus it was something of a literary scandal when noted naturalist and conservationist Grey Owl, whose autobiographical Pilgrims of the Wild appeared in 1935 (2nd ed, 1968), was revealed at his death in 1938 as English-born Archie Belaney . Much the same excitement attended Douglas Spettigue's unmasking of novelist Frederick Philip Grove , a development that put large parts of Grove's much-admired autobiography, In Search of Myself (1946), into the category of fiction. More recently, John Glassco's tour de force in Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970), held by many to be the apex of Canadian literary autobiography, has been shown to be fictionalized in the author's account of the circumstances of its writing, and perhaps in much else.

Full-fledged men and women of letters having until recently been rare in Canada, we have few accounts of a literary life, but those few are worth seeking out, especially Glassco's memoirs (1970); Lovat Dickson's account of his Canadian youth and British publishing career in The Ante-Room (1959) and The House of Words (1963); and George Woodcock's Letter to the Past (1982), about his British childhood, and his account of his work in Canada in Beyond the Blue Mountains (1987). Dorothy Livesay narrates her childhood between the wars as a daughter of a newspaper magnate in Beginnings: A Winnipeg Childhood (1975), and the translation of Gabrielle Roy's autobiography Enchantment and Sorrow (1987) has been powerfully formulative of Canadians' sense of what it meant ot grow up French on the prairies before WWII as well as what the best of Canadian autobiography can do.

Fredelle Bruser Maynard also describes a Manitoba childhood, this time as the daughter of a Jewish shopkeeper in a series of small towns, in Raisins and Almonds (1972); she continues the account through her marriage and her coming to writing in The Tree of Life (1988). In Journeys Through Bookland (1984) Stan Dragland writes autobiography as a memoir of his reading, and in a series of essays collected in A Likely Story (1995). Robert Kroetsch writes about his experiences of childhood and youth important to his writing, then displaces the autobiographical narrative onto a fictionalized persona for the rest of his account.

Among the most analytic and engaging of the growing number of autobiographies about Canadian writers' beginnings is The Russian Album (1987), in which Michael Ignatieff narrates the story of his grandfather's service to and displacement from the Czar's court, his father's Canadian diplomatic service and eventual professional disappointment, and his own decision to live the political life differently through writing.

Ingatieff is only one of a number of writers who have recently turned to the effects of their parents' or grandparents' roots or of immigration on their own lives. The forms they develop to deal with very disparate experiences are among the most innovative in Canadian autobiographical writing. Denise Chong, for example, combines biography with autobiography in The Concubine's Children (1994), the story of 3 generations of Chinese women in Canada. Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee collaborate to write something between a personal memoir and a travel book in Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), a work that becomes the more telling when read against Blaise's own account of his early life as the child of mixed French and English, Canadian and American parentage in essays published in 1982 in The Iowa Review and Salmagundi . The tour de force among such writing, however, indeed among all the Canadian autobiographical writing in English to date, remains Michael Ondaatje's narrative of his return to Sri Lanka and his recovery of his family's stories about themselves in Running in the Family (1982).

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(page 1) p. 1 Introduction

Published: July 2018
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Autobiography continues to be one of the most popular forms of writing, produced by authors from across the social and professional spectrum. It is also central to the work of literary critics, philosophers, historians, and psychologists, who have found in autobiographies not only an understanding of the ways in which lives have been lived, but the most fundamental accounts of what it means to be a self in the world. The Introduction describes what autobiography means and compares it to other forms of ‘life-writing’. Autobiographical writing is seen to act as a window on to concepts of self, identity, and subjectivity, and into the ways in which these are themselves determined by time and circumstance.

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autobiography

What is autobiography definition, usage, and literary examples, autobiography definition.

An autobiography (awe-tow-bye-AWE-gruh-fee) is a self-written biography . The author writes about all or a portion of their own life to share their experience, frame it in a larger cultural or historical context, and/or inform and entertain the reader.

Autobiographies have been a popular literary genre for centuries. The first Western autobiography is attributed to Saint Augustine of Hippo for his 13-book work titled Confessions , written between 397 and 400 CE. Some autobiographies are a straightforward narrative that recollects a linear chain of events as they unfolded. The genre has expanded and evolved to include different approaches to the form.

The word autobiography comes from the Ancient Greek auto (“self”) + bios (“life”) + graphein (“to write”) = “a self-written life.” It is also known as autography .

The History of Autobiography

Scholars regard Augustine’s Confessions as the first Western autobiography. Other autobiographical works from antiquity include Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’s Vita (circa 99 CE) and Greek scholar Libanius’s Oration I (374 CE). Works of this kind were called apologias, which essentially means “in my defense.” Writers approached these works not as acts of self-documentation but as self-defense. They represented a way to explain and provide rationale for their life, work, and escapades. There was also less focus on their emotional lives.

The Book of Margery Kempe , written in 1438 by an English Christian mystic, is the earliest known autobiography in English. (Though it didn’t see full publication until the 20th century.) Other early English-language biographies of note include:

Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s 1764 memoirs
John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners in 1666
Jarena Lee’s The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (the first autobiography of an African American woman)

Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions was published in 1782. It paved the way for the more thoughtful, emotionally centered autobiographies seen today. Autobiography as a literary genre emerged a few years later, when British scholar William Taylor first used the term to describe a self-written biography. He did so disparagingly, suggesting the form was pedantic . In 1809, English Romantic poet Robert Southey used the term more seriously to describe self-written biographies.

Starting in the 20th century, more young people started writing autobiographies. Perhaps the most famous example is Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl , about her time hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. The 21st century saw an increase in autobiographical essay collections and memoirs by younger celebrities, including:

Anna Kendrick
Mindy Kaling
Gabourey Sidibe
Mike Birbiglia
Lena Dunham
Chelsea Handler

Autobiographies are not immune to controversy. One notable scandal involved author James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces . Originally billed as a memoir, evidence later emerged that Frey invented key parts of the story. This example underscores how easily authors can cross over into autofiction—fictional autobiography—and how seriously readers take authors’ responsibility to accurately and honestly market their books.

Types of Autobiographies

There are a few different types of self-written works that qualify as autobiography.

Standard Autobiographies

In the most traditional form, authors recount their life or specific formative events from their life. This approach often utilizes a chronological format of events, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. An author’s approach might include a framing device such as flashbacks, in which they move from the present to the past as they remember their lives. For example, Broadway star Patti LuPone’s self-titled autobiography begins on the opening night of Gypsy in 2004 before moving back in time to LuPone’s childhood. An author could take a more stream-of-consciousness style, in which one memory links to another by a common theme. Irish writer Seán O’Casey narrates his six-volume Autobiographies in this manner

This is a type of autobiography that is narrower in scope and focus. It places greater emphasis on particular memories, thoughts, and feelings. A standard autobiography can certainly cover some of this same ground—most do—but the memoir is more interested in individual events or defined portions of the author’s life and the emotions and lessons behind them.

Henry David Thoreau is a notable memoirist. In Walden , he reflects on his time spent living in solitude in the woods of Massachusetts and what he learned about life and nature throughout this experience. Another example is The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, which relates the death of her husband and its impact on her life and work. Another is Wild by Cheryl Strayed, wherein Strayed remembers her time hiking the Pacific Crest Trail during a period of great change in her life.

Autofiction

The fictionalized autobiography, or autofiction, is another type of autobiography. The author presents their story not as fact but as fiction. This method gives them considerable space to take creative license with events and characters, thereby blurring the lines between reality and fiction. The overall goal is less about the author wanting to obscure facts and make things up and more a matter of taking another tactic to delve into their experiences in service of self-discovery. Taipei by Tao Lin is a work of autofiction. The central character, Paul, mirrors Lin’s own life and experiences, from the literary world of New York City to his ancestral roots in Taiwan.

Spiritual Autobiographies

These autobiographies center on the author’s religious or spiritual awakening and the subsequent journey their faith has taken them on. Common elements include struggles and doubt, a life-altering conversion, periods of regression, and sharing the “message.” These all act as endorsements of the author’s faith. Augustine’s Confessions , Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi , and Augusten Burroughs’s Toil & Trouble: A Memoir are all spiritual autobiographies.

Autobiography vs. Biography

Both autobiographies and biographies are records of real lives, but there is one major distinction. A person other than the book’s subject writes a biography, while the subject themselves writes an autobiography. In this way, an autobiography is essentially a biography of the self. The biographer’s job is typically more involved, entailing detailed research into the life of the subject. The autobiographer, however, is usually not burdened by this because they lived through the events they write about. They may need only to confirm dates and stories to accurately relate the pertinent details.

The Function of Autobiography

An autobiography allows the author to tell the true story of their own life. This is the reason why autobiographies have always been written by famous people. History tends to remember notable individuals for just one significant contribution or event and, even then, the public’s perception of it may be inaccurate. Writing an autobiography allows the author to share the real story and put it into the larger context of their life and times.

Most readers pick up an autobiography expecting some degree of subjectivity from the author. After all, the events chronicled happened to the author, so the writing will of course have a biased perspective . There are advantages to this subjectivity, though. The reader gets the real story directly from the person who lived it, unvarnished by others’ opinions or erroneous historical data.

One way this subjectivity is problematic is that the author may not possess the ability to see the story they’re telling from other perspectives. For example, they may not acknowledge any hurt they caused others, dangerous behaviors they engaged in, or the “other side” of a controversial event in which there are equally valid opposing viewpoints and experiences. Any of these deficiencies can result in a somewhat skewed narrative.

Writers Known for Autobiography & Autobiography Books

Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , Gather Together in My Name
Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa , Shadows on the Grass
Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking , Shockaholic
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle
Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
Anaïs Nin, The Diaries of Anaïs Nin
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Patti Smith, Just Kids , M Train
Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi: An Autobiography

Examples of Autobiographies

1. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Angelou’s autobiography is the first installment in a seven-volume series chronicling the life of the legendary poet, teacher, actress, director, dancer, and civil rights activist. Given all those roles, it’s easy to see why Angelou’s life story makes for interesting reading.

This volume centers primarily on her early life in Stamps, Arkansas, and the devastating effects of a childhood rape. It also explores racism in the American South. It discuses the important role reading plays in helping young Maya deal with the sexual assault and pervasive prejudice in her environment.

2. Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

Keller’s autobiography details her first 20 years, starting with the childhood illness that caused her blindness and deafness. She discusses the obstacles she had to overcome and the life-changing relationship she shared with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, who helped her learn to read and write. Keller also documents her friendships with several famous figures of her day, including Alexander Graham Bell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and First Lady Frances Cleveland.

3. Vinh Chung, Where the Wind Leads

Chung’s autobiography recalls the harrowing story of a Vietnamese refugee and his journey to make the American Dream his own. Born in South Vietnam, Chung comes of age in a changing political climate that eventually compels his family to flee the country. Their voyage takes them through the South China Sea, run-ins with pirates, resettlement in Arkansas, and Chung’s graduation from Harvard Medical School.

How to Write an Autobiography

Autobiography is a truly universal art form and is accessible to anyone, whether you're in high school or 100 years old. Exploring the process of writing an autobiography deserves an article in itself, but the process should include these steps:

Determine your "why." What lessons do you want to impart via your story, and why are they worth sharing with a broader audience?
Draft an autobiographical outline. It should include information about your upbringing, impactful moments throughout your life, stories of failure and success, and meaningful mentors.
Begin with the easiest sections. Getting started is often the greatest hurdle, so begin by writing the chapters that feel most accessible or enjoyable.
Write your first draft. Once you write the first chapters, it will feel easier to write the rest. Capitalize on your momentum and write a full draft.
Step away. As with anything, stepping away from your work will help foster fresh perspectives when you return.
Edit and re-write your draft. Your first draft will probably benefit from thorough revisions, as will your second draft, and maybe your third. Continue to edit and revise until it feels right.
Ask for help. Bring in a trusted family member or friend or professional editor to help with final edits.

Further Resources on Autobiography

ThoughtCo. shares some important points to consider before writing an autobiography .

The Living Handbook of Narratology delves into the history of the autobiography .

MasterClass breaks autobiography writing down into eight basic steps .

Pen & the Pad looks at the advantages and disadvantages of the autobiography .

Lifehack has a list of 15 autobiographies everyone should read at least once .

Related Terms

Frame Story
Point of View

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A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2016) -- uncorrected proofs

Edited collection -- with chapters by Adam Smyth, Barry Windeatt, David Matthew, Molly Murray, Kathleen Lynch, Suzanne Trill, Tessa Whitehouse, Robert Folkenflik, Lynn Festa, John Richetti, David Vincent, Duncan Wu, Richard Hughes Gibson, Timothy Larsen, Carol Hanbery MacKay, Julie Codell, Stephen Colclough, Max Saunders, Georgia Johnston, Hope Wolf, Laura Marcus, Maud Ellman, Michael O'Neill, Nick Hubble, Bart Moore-Gilbert, Joseph Brooker, Neil Vickers, Roger Luckhurst, Andreas Kitzmann

Related Papers

Gabriele M. Linke

Philippa Kelly

Galaxy International Multidisciplinary Research Journal

Riya Mukherjee

Charles Ivan Armstrong

This paper is focused on the reconsideration of the limits and advances of the genre of autobiography. Given the recent boom in autobiography and personal narratives this timely topic poses a great challenge to current literary and cultural studies. Autobiography frequently takes the form of a disturbance, upsetting the expectations and classifications of both general public and literary critics. What presuppositions does the genre of autobiography build upon, and how should we respond when more strictly literary genres integrate autobiographical elements? This paper will explore selected, representative examples of how autobiography and autobiographically inclined literary works have challenged pervading norms over the last two centuries. The use of autobiographical elements in literature has repeatedly been part of an estranging revitalization of more or less settled literary forms, in addition to contributing to the reimagining of nationality through the example of representative or marginal identities, such as in the case of W. B. Yeats. The examples will span from the Romanticism of William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, via the 19th century call for uncompromising “sincerity” and the ensuing experiments of Modernism, to more recent instances of confessionalism in writers such as Robert Lowell and Karl-Ove Knausgård. The borders and dialogue between life and writing will be in focus in this paper, and the degree to which critical terms text, context and paratext help us understand and clarify their complex interaction will be subject to discussion.

Maria Dibattista

Graham Holderness

Life Writing

Jaume Aurell

Experimentation and theorising on forms of life writing from the field of history has grown substantially in recent decades, as historians understand how autobiographical narrative may contribute to understanding both the past and our processes of accessing it. The introduction to this special issue on ‘History and Autobiography’ outlines some theoretical debates emerging from the intersection of history with different forms of self-representation, and highlights some of the main points examined by the contributors. Some contributors explore the convergence of history and life writing through an autobiographical voice, while others work theoretically or critically. Beyond these different approaches, all the essays explore to what extent autobiography serves historical writing and comprehension, and examine the theoretical and practical consequences of this convergence.

Linden West

Biograpahical researchers in the United Kingdom have been influenced by symbolic interactionism, feminism, oral history, critical sociology, psychoanalysis and what we term an auto/biographical imagination. The latter involves reflexively situating the researcher and her influence, via power, unconscious processes and writing, into the text and by acknowledging the co-construction of stories. The focus of much research has been on marginalised peoples, as part of a democratising project to bring more diverse voices and stories into the historical or contemporary social record. It is important to avoid too rigid a distinction between mainland Europe and developments in Britain. Collaboration and dialogue have been extensive, across various research networks, including in the European Society for Research in the Education of Adults (ESREA).

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What Is an Autobiography?

What to Consider Before You Start to Write

Writing Research Papers
Writing Essays
English Grammar
M.Ed., Education Administration, University of Georgia
B.A., History, Armstrong State University

Your life story, or autobiography , should contain the basic framework that any essay should have, with four basic elements. Begin with an introduction that includes a thesis statement , followed by a body containing at least several paragraphs , if not several chapters. To complete the autobiography, you'll need a strong conclusion , all the while crafting an interesting narrative with a theme.

Did You Know?

The word autobiography literally means SELF (auto), LIFE (bio), WRITING (graph). Or, in other words, an autobiography is the story of someone's life written or otherwise told by that person.

When writing your autobiography, find out what makes your family or your experience unique and build a narrative around that. Doing some research and taking detailed notes can help you discover the essence of what your narrative should be and craft a story that others will want to read.

Research Your Background

Just like the biography of a famous person, your autobiography should include things like the time and place of your birth, an overview of your personality, your likes and dislikes, and the special events that shaped your life. Your first step is to gather background detail. Some things to consider:

What is interesting about the region where you were born?
How does your family history relate to the history of that region?
Did your family come to that region for a reason?

It might be tempting to start your story with "I was born in Dayton, Ohio...," but that is not really where your story begins. It's better to start with an experience. You may wish to start with something like why you were born where you were and how your family's experience led to your birth. If your narrative centers more around a pivotal moment in your life, give the reader a glimpse into that moment. Think about how your favorite movie or novel begins, and look for inspiration from other stories when thinking about how to start your own.

Think About Your Childhood

You may not have had the most interesting childhood in the world, but everyone has had a few memorable experiences. Highlight the best parts when you can. If you live in a big city, for instance, you should realize that many people who grew up in the country have never ridden a subway, walked to school, ridden in a taxi, or walked to a store a few blocks away.

On the other hand, if you grew up in the country you should consider that many people who grew up in the suburbs or inner city have never eaten food straight from a garden, camped in their backyards, fed chickens on a working farm, watched their parents canning food, or been to a county fair or a small-town festival.

Something about your childhood will always seem unique to others. You just have to step outside your life for a moment and address the readers as if they knew nothing about your region and culture. Pick moments that will best illustrate the goal of your narrative, and symbolism within your life.

Consider Your Culture

Your culture is your overall way of life , including the customs that come from your family's values and beliefs. Culture includes the holidays you observe, the customs you practice, the foods you eat, the clothes you wear, the games you play, the special phrases you use, the language you speak, and the rituals you practice.

As you write your autobiography, think about the ways that your family celebrated or observed certain days, events, and months, and tell your audience about special moments. Consider these questions:

What was the most special gift you ever received? What was the event or occasion surrounding that gift?
Is there a certain food that you identify with a certain day of the year?
Is there an outfit that you wear only during a special event?

Think honestly about your experiences, too. Don't just focus on the best parts of your memories; think about the details within those times. While Christmas morning may be a magical memory, you might also consider the scene around you. Include details like your mother making breakfast, your father spilling his coffee, someone upset over relatives coming into town, and other small details like that. Understanding the full experience of positives and negatives helps you paint a better picture for the reader and lead to a stronger and more interesting narrative. Learn to tie together all the interesting elements of your life story and craft them into an engaging essay.

Establish the Theme

Once you have taken a look at your own life from an outsider’s point of view, you will be able to select the most interesting elements from your notes to establish a theme. What was the most interesting thing you came up with in your research? Was it the history of your family and your region? Here is an example of how you can turn that into a theme:

"Today, the plains and low hills of southeastern Ohio make the perfect setting for large cracker box-shaped farmhouses surrounded by miles of corn rows. Many of the farming families in this region descended from the Irish settlers who came rolling in on covered wagons in the 1830s to find work building canals and railways. My ancestors were among those settlers."

A little bit of research can make your own personal story come to life as a part of history, and historical details can help a reader better understand your unique situation. In the body of your narrative, you can explain how your family’s favorite meals, holiday celebrations, and work habits relate to Ohio history.

One Day as a Theme

You also can take an ordinary day in your life and turn it into a theme. Think about the routines you followed as a child and as an adult. Even a mundane activity like household chores can be a source of inspiration.

For example, if you grew up on a farm, you know the difference between the smell of hay and wheat, and certainly that of pig manure and cow manure—because you had to shovel one or all of these at some point. City people probably don’t even know there is a difference. Describing the subtle differences of each and comparing the scents to other scents can help the reader imagine the situation more clearly.

If you grew up in the city, you how the personality of the city changes from day to night because you probably had to walk to most places. You know the electricity-charged atmosphere of the daylight hours when the streets bustle with people and the mystery of the night when the shops are closed and the streets are quiet.

Think about the smells and sounds you experienced as you went through an ordinary day and explain how that day relates to your life experience in your county or your city:

"Most people don’t think of spiders when they bite into a tomato, but I do. Growing up in southern Ohio, I spent many summer afternoons picking baskets of tomatoes that would be canned or frozen and preserved for cold winter’s dinners. I loved the results of my labors, but I’ll never forget the sight of the enormous, black and white, scary-looking spiders that lived in the plants and created zigzag designs on their webs. In fact, those spiders, with their artistic web creations, inspired my interest in bugs and shaped my career in science."

One Event as a Theme

Perhaps one event or one day of your life made such a big impact that it could be used as a theme. The end or beginning of the life of another can affect our thoughts and actions for a long time:

"I was 12 years old when my mother passed away. By the time I was 15, I had become an expert in dodging bill collectors, recycling hand-me-down jeans, and stretching a single meal’s worth of ground beef into two family dinners. Although I was a child when I lost my mother, I was never able to mourn or to let myself become too absorbed in thoughts of personal loss. The fortitude I developed at a young age was the driving force that would see me through many other challenges."

Writing the Essay

Whether you determine that your life story is best summed up by a single event, a single characteristic, or a single day, you can use that one element as a theme . You will define this theme in your introductory paragraph .

Create an outline with several events or activities that relate back to your central theme and turn those into subtopics (body paragraphs) of your story. Finally, tie up all your experiences in a summary that restates and explains the overriding theme of your life.

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International edition
Australia edition
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Margery Kempe, the first English autobiographer, goes online

Laying claim to being the first autobiography ever written in English, the "extraordinary" life story of the medieval mystic Margery Kempe, which exists in only one known copy, has been digitised by the British Library for the world to view.

Kempe lived in Norfolk from around 1373 to 1440. After she had given birth to 14 children, she made a vow to live chastely with her husband, and embarked on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, Italy and Germany. Her devotion was expressed through loud cries and roars, which often irritated bystanders, but she became famous as a mystic, and claimed to have conversations with God.

She dictated her life story to a priest, but her autobiography was only known through excerpts printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1501, and by Henry Pepwell, who called her a "devoute ancres", in 1521, until a complete manuscript – thought to be a copy made from the original, possibly under Kempe's supervision – was discovered in a cupboard in the 1930s.

"The story goes that when Colonel W Butler Bowdon was looking for a ping-pong bat in a cupboard at his family home near Chesterfield in the early 1930s he came across a pile of old books. Frustrated at the disorder, he threatened to put the whole lot on the bonfire the next day so that bats and balls would be easier to find in future. Luckily a friend advised him to have the books checked by an expert and shortly afterwards Hope Emily Allen identified one as the Book of Margery Kempe," said Sarah J Biggs, from the British Library's medieval team.

Biggs said the memoir, which has just been digitised by the British Library , was "perhaps the first autobiography written in English", and is also "a remarkable record of the religious life of a woman during the tumultuous 14th and 15th centuries".

Kempe refers to herself in her book in the third person as "this creatur", opening her story by telling of how after the birth of her first child she became ill and believed herself to be surrounded by devils. Forcibly restrained, she tore at her skin and bit her hand so hard she retained the marks for the rest of her life, before Jesus appeared to her in a vision and she grew calm.

"Margery Kempe led an extraordinary life," said Biggs, "and this manuscript is of incredible importance for scholars of this period. Prior to the 1930s this text was only known through 16th-century printed versions, and is the first such manuscript containing her autobiography. We are pleased to be able to make it available worldwide."

The first page of the manuscript states "Liber Montis Gracie. This boke is of Mountegrace", with the pages annotated by four scribes, said the British Library, "probably monks associated with the Carthusian priory of Mount Grace in Yorkshire". Their notes highlight key passages, such as "nota de clamore" when Kempe utters her first cry, and "mirabile" to mark a miraculous event.

One of these miracles, said the British Library, occurs when Kempe meets a very learned priest, a "Dewcheman" (German) who could not understand what she said, so they had to speak to each other through an interpreter. Kempe advised the priest to pray for 13 days, and at the end of this "he undirstod what sche seyd in Englysch to hym and sche undirstod what that he seyd. And yet he undirstod not Englisch that other men spokyn".

"A miracle indeed! But for Margery this was not an occasion to celebrate," said the library. Instead, "sche sobbyd boistowsly and cryed ful lowde and horybly".

"One wonders what the learned priest's reaction could have been," said Biggs, adding that Kempe had been described by critics as everything from a religious eccentric to a feminist icon, a literary genius and an early social reformer, but that "however we view her, there is no doubt that the work provides an invaluable insight into 15th-century urban life and into the religious practices of the period."

British Library

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British Library staging exhibition of comics in 'overdue' celebration of genre

Hanif Kureishi's archive acquired by British Library

The British Library is still one Flickr away from making all art free

Comments (…), most viewed.

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Autobiography of a Newspaper

Published by Karen in category Social and Moral with tag home | old

Autobiography of a Newspaper Photo credit: shuttermaster from morguefile.com

Just out of the printing press I smell wonderful. I smell strongly of ink and I am also very warm to hold. Its not just me though. Even my friends smella and feel the same. That’s why they are my family. This is my first day of life. My excitement undeniable. I am now stacked on top of my friends and bound by a rope. We are flung into the back of a van and thus my journey begins. Its a bumpy ride to my desined home. Ahh… the thought of a home warms my heart. Suddenly, the van stops with a jerk. I hear noises and then the door is flung open. My friends and I are pulled forward and then flung out of the van on to hard ground. It took me few minutes to realise that this isn’t home. It can’t be! Just then we were lifted of the ground and placed on the basket of a bike. I hoped once again to be home soon. I enjoyed the bike ride as wind flew through my folds. It was cold yet great. Then, yet again we stopped. Tring tring. A bell rang from very near me it almost made me jump. Then I was ripped from the stack and thrown. Fear was all over me. What was happening? It seemed like forever as I went flying through the air. Finally I slowed and neared ground. I fell and slid a few paces before coming to stop right in front of the front door of a house. I stared at that door and felt a new found happiness. I was home.

I lay there waiting, it seemed like hours. Was I not wanted at my new home. I was beginning to feel disappointed and rejected when the door flew open and I was picked up. I was opened and admired. I was caresser so softly I wanted to cry. Everyone wanted to see me. They wanted a peek at all the secrets I hold dear. I let them. I let them know me inside out. They were my family.

But as night came by, I have been sitting on the table for hours. They have lost interest in me. I began to panic. I didn’t know what to do. Finally I was once again lifted and held close to a heart. Just as I was getting used to feeling of being loved I was dropped on the floor of a very dark and congested room. I looked to my side and so many others like me. Dirty, old and crumpled. I was no different. As sadness enveloped my little heart I fell into deep sleep.

Next morning, I was awokened by loud voices. It was a new day, a new beginning. I could only hope. The door to the dark room was opened and in the blink of an eye I was pulled out. Tiny hands held me and waved me around so much my head started to spin. But a little girl cannot be blamed. She wouldn’t know what to do. Suddenly I felt a stabbing pain on my side. A bit of me had been ripped of to wipe a window. I felt pain again and more of me had been ripped of to clean a spilt drink off of a table. I wanted to crybout and ask them to stop, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t make a sound.

Finally when I was done for, I was crumpled up and thrown into a garbage bin. I stayed there, amongst dirt and other things. I no longer smelled of the wonderful ink, I no longer felt warm. I was dumped out with the rest of the garbage and sorted. I was thrown into a pile with all kinds of papers. We were then taken to be recycled. We were wet and turned to pulp. We were left our under the sun to dry. I knew all along what my fate would be. A was meant to be a newspaper once again…

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Writing My Autobiography

A re you still writing?” he asked.

“I am,” I answered.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

“An autobiography,” I said.

“Interesting,” he replied. “Whose?”

The implication here, you will note, is that mine hasn’t been a life sufficiently interesting to merit an autobiography. The implication isn’t altogether foolish. Most autobiographies, at least the best autobiographies, have been written by people who have historical standing, or have known many important people, or have lived in significant times, or have noteworthy family connections or serious lessons to convey . I qualify on none of these grounds. Not that, roughly two years ago when I sat down to write my autobiography, I let that stop me.

An autobiography, to state the obvious, is at base a biography written by its own subject. But how is one to write it: as a matter of setting the record straight, as a form of confessional, as a mode of seeking justice, or as a justification of one’s life? “An autobiography,” wrote George Orwell, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Is this true? I prefer to think not.

Autobiography is a complex enterprise, calling for its author not only to know himself but to be honest in conveying that knowledge. “I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Let him relate the events of his own life with Honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.” One of the nicest things about being a professor, it has been said, is that one gets to talk for fifty minutes without being interrupted. So one of the allurements of autobiography is that one gets to write hundreds of pages about that eminently fascinating character, oneself, even if in doing so one only establishes one’s insignificance.

The great autobiographies—of which there have not been all that many—have been wildly various. One of the first, that of the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, is marked by an almost unrelieved braggadocio: No artist was more perfect, no warrior more brave, no lover more pleasing than the author, or so he would have us believe. Edward Gibbon’s autobiography, though elegantly written, is disappointing in its brevity. That of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, heavily striking the confessional note, might have been told in a booth to a priest. Ben Franklin’s autobiography is full of advice on how the rest of us should live. John Stuart Mill’s is astounding in its account of its author’s prodigiously early education, which began with his learning Greek under his father’s instruction at the age of three. Then there is Henry Adams’s autobiography, suffused with disappointment over his feeling out of joint with his times and the world’s not recognizing his true value. In Making It , Norman Podhoretz wrote an autobiography informed by a single message, which he termed a “dirty little secret,” namely that there is nothing wrong with ambition and that success, despite what leftist intellectuals might claim, is nothing to be ashamed of.

Please note that all of these are books written by men. Might it be that women lack the vanity required to write—or should I say “indulge in”—the literary act of autobiography? In Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome , I recently read that Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, wrote her autobiography, which has not survived, and which Mary Beard counts as “one of the great losses of all classical literature.” I wish that Jane Austen had written an autobiography, and so too George Eliot and Willa Cather. Perhaps these three women, great writers all, were too sensibly modest for autobiography, that least modest of all literary forms.

A utobiography can be the making or breaking of writers who attempt it. John Stuart Mill’s autobiography has gone a long way toward humanizing a writer whose other writings tend toward the coldly formal. Harold Laski wrote that Mill’s “ Autobiography , in the end the most imperishable of his writings, is a record as noble as any in our literature of consistent devotion to the public good.”

If Mill’s autobiography humanized him, the autobiography of the novelist Anthony Trollope did for him something approaching the reverse. In An Autobiography , Trollope disdains the notion of an author’s needing inspiration to write well. He reports that “there was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office,” where he had a regular job. “I was free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession [that of novelist], I found it to be expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws.” Trollope recounts—emphasis here on “counts”—that as a novelist he averages forty pages per week, at 250 words per page. He writes: “There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn.” Trollope then mentions that on the day after he finished his novel Doctor Thorne , he began writing his next novel, The Bertrams . For a long spell the literati refused to forgive Trollope for shearing inspiration away from the creation of literary art, for comparing the job of the novelist to a job at the post office. Only the splendid quality of his many novels eventually won him forgiveness and proper recognition.

A serious biography takes up what the world thinks of its subject, what his friends and family think of him, and—if the information is available in letters, diaries, journals, or interviews—what he thinks of himself. An autobiography is ultimately about the last question: what the author thinks of himself. Yet how many of us have sufficient self-knowledge to give a convincing answer? In her splendid novel Memoirs of Hadrian , Marguerite Yourcenar has Hadrian note: “When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity.” The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the scrupulously examined one is rare indeed.

My own life has not provided the richest fodder for autobiography. For one thing, it has not featured much in the way of drama. For another, good fortune has allowed me the freedom to do with my life much as I have wished. I have given my autobiography the title Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life , with the subtitle Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life . Now well along in its closing chapter, mine, I contend, has been thus far—here I pause to touch wood—a most lucky life.

My title derives from the story of Croesus, who ruled the country of Lydia from circa 585–547 b.c. , and who is perhaps today best known for the phrase “rich as Croesus.” The vastly wealthy Croesus thought himself the luckiest man on earth and asked confirmation of this from Solon, the wise Athenian, who told him that in fact the luckiest man on earth was another Athenian who had two sons in that year’s Olympics. When Croesus asked who was second luckiest, Solon cited another Greek who had a most happy family life. Croesus was displeased but not convinced by Solon’s answers. Years later he was captured by the Persian Cyrus, divested of his kingdom and his wealth, and set on a pyre to be burned alive, before which he was heard to exclaim that Solon had been right. The moral of the story is, of course: Never say you have had a lucky life until you know how your life ends.

I have known serious sadness in my life. I have undergone a divorce. I have become a member of that most dolorous of clubs, parents who have buried one of their children. Yet I have had much to be grateful for. In the final paragraph of a book I wrote some years ago on the subject of ambition, I noted that “We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing.” In all these realms, I lucked out. I was born to intelligent, kindly parents; at a time that, though I was drafted into the army, allowed me to miss being called up to fight in any wars; and in the largely unmitigated prosperity enjoyed by the world’s most interesting country, the United States of America.

Writing is a form of discovery. Yet can even writing ferret out the quality and meaning of one’s own life? Alexis de Tocqueville, the endlessly quotable Tocqueville, wrote: “The fate of individuals is still more hidden than that of peoples,” and “the destinies of individuals are often as uncertain as those of nations.” Fate, destiny, those two great tricksters, who knows what they have in store for one, even in the final days of one’s life? I, for example, as late as the age of eighteen, had never heard the word “intellectual.” If you had asked me what a man of letters was, I would have said a guy who works at the post office. Yet I have been destined to function as an intellectual for the better part of my adult life, and have more than once been called a man of letters. Fate, destiny, go figure!

T he first question that arises in writing one’s autobiography is what to include and what to exclude. Take, for starters, sex. In his nearly seven-hundred-page autobiography, Journeys of the Mind , the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown waits until page 581 to mention, in the most glancing way, that he is married. Forty or so pages later, the name of a second wife is mentioned. Whether he had children with either of these wives, we never learn. But then, Brown’s is a purely intellectual autobiography, concerned all but exclusively with the development of the author’s mind and those who influenced that development.

My autobiography, though less than half the length of Brown’s, allowed no such luxury of reticence. Sex, especially when I was an adolescent, was a central subject, close to a preoccupation. After all, boys—as I frequently instructed my beautiful granddaughter Annabelle when she was growing up—are brutes. I came of age BP, or Before the Pill, and consummated sex, known in that day as “going all the way,” was not then a serious possibility. Too much was at risk—pregnancy, loss of reputation—for middle-class girls. My friends and I turned to prostitution.

Apart from occasionally picking up streetwalkers on some of Chicago’s darker streets, prostitution for the most part meant trips of sixty or so miles to the bordellos of Braidwood or Kankakee, Illinois. The sex, costing $3, was less than perfunctory. (“Don’t bother to take off your socks or that sweater,” one was instructed.) What was entailed was less sensual pleasure than a rite of passage, of becoming a man, of “losing your cherry,” a phrase I have only recently learned means forgoing one’s innocence. We usually went on these trips in groups of five or six in one or another of our fathers’ cars. Much joking on the way up and even more on the way back. Along Chicago’s Outer Drive, which we took home in those days, there was a Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer sign that read, “Have you had it lately?,” which always got a good laugh.

I like to think of myself as a shy pornographer, or, perhaps better, a sly pornographer. By this I mean that in my fiction and where necessary in my essays I do not shy away from the subject of sex, only from the need to describe it in any of its lurid details. So I have done in my autobiography. On the subject of sex in my first marriage (of two), for example, I say merely, “I did not want my money back.” But, then, all sex, if one comes to think about it, is essentially comic, except of course one’s own.

On the inclusion-exclusion question, the next subject I had to consider was money, or my personal finances. Financially I have nothing to brag about. In my autobiography I do, though, occasionally give the exact salaries—none of them spectacular—of the jobs I’ve held. With some hesitation (lest it seem boasting) I mention that a book I wrote on the subject of snobbery earned, with its paperback sale, roughly half-a-million dollars. I fail to mention those of my books that earned paltry royalties, or, as I came to think of them, peasantries. In my autobiography, I contented myself with noting my good fortune in being able to earn enough money doing pretty much what I wished to do and ending up having acquired enough money not to worry overmuch about financial matters. Like the man said, a lucky life.

If I deal glancingly in my autobiography with sex and personal finances, I tried to take a pass on politics. My own political development is of little interest. I started out in my political life a fairly standard liberal—which in those days meant despising Richard Nixon—and have ended up today contemptuous of both our political parties: Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, as the critic Dwight Macdonald referred to them. Forgive the self-congratulatory note, but in politics I prefer to think myself a member in good standing of that third American political party, never alas on the ballot, the anti-BS party.

Of course, sometimes one needs to have a politics, if only to fight off the politics of others. Ours is a time when politics seems to be swamping all else: art, education, journalism, culture generally. I have had the dubious distinction of having been “canceled,” for what were thought my political views, and I write about this experience in my autobiography. I was fired from the editorship of Phi Beta Kappa’s quarterly magazine, the American Scholar —a job I had held for more than twenty years—because of my ostensibly conservative, I suppose I ought to make that “right-wing,” politics. My chief cancellers were two academic feminists and an African-American historian-biographer, who sat on the senate, or governing board, of Phi Beta Kappa.

T he official version given out by Phi Beta Kappa for my cancellation—in those days still known as a firing—was that the magazine was losing subscribers and needed to seek younger readers. Neither assertion was true, but both currently appear in the Wikipedia entry under my name. The New York Times also printed this “official” but untrue version of my cancellation. In fact, I was canceled because I had failed to run anything in the magazine about academic feminism or race, both subjects that had already been done to death elsewhere and that I thought cliché-ridden and hence of little interest for a magazine I specifically tried to keep apolitical. During my twenty-two years at the American Scholar , the name of no current United States president was mentioned. If anything resembling a theme emerged during my editorship, it was the preservation of the tradition of the liberal arts, a subject on which I was able to acquire contributions from Jacques Barzun, Paul Kristeller, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Frederick Crews, and others.

That I was fired not for anything I had done but for things I had failed to do is an indication of how far we had come in the realm of political correctness. I take up this topic in my autobiography, one theme of which is the vast changes that have taken place in American culture over my lifetime. A notable example is an essay on homosexuality that I wrote and published in Harper’s in 1970, a mere fifty-three years ago. The essay made the points that we still did not know much about the origin of male homosexuality, that there was much hypocrisy concerning the subject, that homosexuals were living under considerable social pressure and prejudice, and that given a choice, most people would prefer that their children not be homosexual. This, as I say, was in 1970, before the gay liberation movement had got underway in earnest. The essay attracted a vast number of letters in opposition, and a man named Merle Miller, who claimed I was calling for genocide of homosexuals, wrote a book based on the essay. Gore Vidal, never known for his temperate reasoning, claimed my argument was ad Hitlerum . (Vidal, after contracting Epstein-Barr virus late in life, claimed that “Joseph Epstein gave it to me.”) I have never reprinted the essay in any of my collections because I felt that it would stir up too much strong feeling. For what it is worth, I also happen to be pleased by the greater tolerance accorded homosexuality in the half century since my essay was published.

The larger point is that today neither Harper’s nor any other mainstream magazine would dare to publish that essay. Yet a few years after the essay was published, I was offered a job teaching in the English Department of Northwestern University, and the year after that, I was appointed editor of the American Scholar. Today, of course, neither job would have been available to me.

Do these matters—my cancellation from the American Scholar , my unearned reputation as a homophobe—come under the heading of self-justification? Perhaps so. But then, what better, or at least more convenient, place to attempt to justify oneself than in one’s autobiography?

Many changes have taken place in my lifetime, some for the better, some for the worse, some whose value cannot yet be known. I note, for example, if not the death then the attenuation of the extended family (nephews, nieces, cousins) in American life. Whereas much of my parents’ social life revolved around an extensive cousinage, I today have grandnephews and grandnieces living on both coasts whom I have never met and probably never shall. I imagine some of them one day being notified of my death and responding, “Really? [Pause] What’s for dinner?”

I take up in my autobiography what Philip Rieff called, in his book of this title, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, a development that has altered child-rearing, artistic creation, and much else in our culture. Although the doctrines of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others are no longer taken as gospel, their secondary influence has conquered much of modern culture. My parents’ generation did not hold with therapeutic culture, which contends that the essentials of life are the achievement of self-esteem and individual happiness, replacing honor, courage, kindness, and generosity.

In my autobiography, I note that when my mother was depressed by her knowledge that she was dying of cancer, a friend suggested that there were support groups for people with terminal diseases, one of which might be helpful. I imagined telling my mother about such groups, and her response: “Let me see,” she is likely to have said. “You want me to go into a room with strangers, where I will listen to their problems and then I’ll tell them mine, and this will make me feel better.” Pause. “Is this the kind of idiot I’ve raised as a son?”

T hen there is digital culture, the verdict on which is not yet in. Digital culture has changed the way we read, think, make social connections, do business, and so much more. I write in my autobiography that in its consequences digital culture is up there with the printing press and the automobile. Its influence is still far from fully fathomed.

One of my challenges in writing my autobiography was to avoid seeming to brag about my quite modest accomplishments. In the Rhetoric , Aristotle writes: “Speaking at length about oneself, making false claims, taking the credit for what another has done, these are signs of boastfulness.” I tried not to lapse into boasting. Yet at one point I quote Jacques Barzun, in a letter to me, claiming that as a writer I am in the direct line of William Hazlitt, though in some ways better, for my task—that of finding the proper language to establish both intimacy and critical distance—is in the current day more difficult than in Hazlitt’s. At least I deliberately neglected to mention that, in response to my being fired from the American Scholar, Daniel Patrick Moynihan flew an American flag at half-mast over the Capitol, a flag he sent to me as a souvenir. Quoting others about my accomplishments, is this anything other than boasting by other means? I hope so, though even now I’m not altogether sure.

I have a certain pride in these modest accomplishments. Setting out in life, I never thought I should publish some thirty-odd books or have the good luck to continue writing well into my eighties. The question for me as an autobiographer was how to express that pride without preening. The most efficient way, of course, is never to write an autobiography.

Why, then, did I write mine? Although I have earlier characterized writing as a form of discovery, I did not, in writing my autobiography, expect to discover many radically new things about my character or the general lineaments of my life. Nor did I think that my life bore any lessons that were important to others. I had, and still have, little to confess; I have no hidden desire to be spanked by an NFL linebacker in a nun’s habit. A writer, a mere scribbler, I have led a largely spectatorial life, standing on the sidelines, glass of wine in hand, watching the circus pass before me.

Still, I wrote my autobiography, based in a loose way on Wordsworth’s notion that poetry arises from “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Writing it gave me an opportunity to review my life at the end of my life in a tranquil manner. I was able to note certain trends, parallels, and phenomena that have marked my life and set my destiny.

The first of these, as I remarked earlier, was the fortunate time in which I was born, namely the tail end of the Great Depression—to be specific, in 1937. Because of the Depression, people were having fewer children, and often having them later. (My mother was twenty-seven, my father thirty at my birth.) Born when it was, my generation, though subject to the draft—not, in my experience of it, a bad thing—danced between the wars: We were too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam. We were also children during World War II, the last war the country fully supported, which gave us a love of our country. Ours was a low-population generation, untroubled by the vagaries of college admissions or the trauma of rejection by the school of one’s choice. Colleges, in fact, wanted us.

Or consider parents, another fateful phenomenon over which one has no choice. To be born to thoughtless, or disagreeable, or depressed, or deeply neurotic parents cannot but substantially affect all one’s days. Having a father who is hugely successful in the world can be as dampening to the spirit as having a father who is a failure. And yet about all this one has no say. I have given the chapter on my parents the title “A Winning Ticket in the Parents Lottery,” for my own parents, though neither went to college, were thoughtful, honorable, and in no way psychologically crushing. They gave my younger brother and me the freedom to develop on our own; they never told me what schools to attend, what work to seek, whom or when to marry. I knew I was never at the center of my parents’ lives, yet I also knew I could count on them when I needed their support, which more than once I did, and they did not fail to come through. As I say, a winning ticket.

As one writes about one’s own life, certain themes are likely to emerge that hadn’t previously stood out so emphatically. In my case, one persistent motif is that of older boys, then older men, who have supported or aided me in various ways. A boy nearly two years older than I named Jack Libby saw to it that I wasn’t bullied or pushed around in a neighborhood where I was the youngest kid on the block. In high school, a boy to whom I have given the name Jeremy Klein taught me a thing or two about gambling and corruption generally. Later in life, men eight, nine, ten, even twenty or more years older than I promoted my career: Hilton Kramer in promoting my candidacy for the editorship of the American Scholar , Irving Howe in helping me get a teaching job (without an advanced degree) at Northwestern, John Gross in publishing me regularly on important subjects in the Times Literary Supplement , Edward Shils in ways too numerous to mention. Something there was about me, evidently, that was highly protégéable.

I haven’t yet seen the index for my autobiography, but my guess is that it could have been name-ier. I failed, for example, to include my brief but pleasing friendship with Sol Linowitz. Sol was the chairman of Xerox, and later served the Johnson administration as ambassador to the Organization of American States. He also happened to be a reader of mine, and on my various trips to Washington I was often his guest at the F Street Club, a political lunch club where he reserved a private room in which we told each other jokes, chiefly Jewish jokes. I might also have added my six years as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose members included the actors Robert Stack and Celeste Holm, the Balanchine dancer Arthur Mitchell, Robert Joffrey, the soprano Renée Fleming, the novelist Toni Morrison, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, the architect I. M. Pei, the painter Helen Frankenthaler, and other highly droppable names.

Confronting one’s regrets is another inescapable element in writing one’s autobiography. Ah, regrets: the red MG convertible one didn’t buy in one’s twenties, the elegant young Asian woman one should have asked to dinner, the year one failed to spend in Paris. The greater the number of one’s regrets, the grander their scope, the sadder, at its close, one’s life figures to be. I come out fairly well in the regrets ledger. I regret not having studied classics at university, and so today I cannot read ancient Greek. I regret not having been a better father to my sons. I regret not asking my mother more questions about her family and not telling my father what a good man I thought he was. As regrets go, these are not minor, yet neither have I found them to be crippling.

Then there is the matter of recognizing one’s quirks, or peculiar habits. A notable one of mine, acquired late in life, is to have become near to the reverse of a hypochondriac. I have not yet reached the stage of anosognosia, or the belief that one is well when one is ill—a stage, by the way, that Chekhov, himself a physician, seems to have attained. I take vitamins, get flu and Covid shots, and watch what I eat, but I try to steer clear of physicians. This tendency kicked in not long after my decades-long primary care physician retired. In his The Body: A Guide for Occupants , Bill Bryson defines good health as the health enjoyed by someone who hasn’t had a physical lately. The ancients made this point more directly, advising bene caca et declina medicos (translation on request) . For a variety of reasons, physicians of the current day are fond of sending patients for a multiplicity of tests: bone density tests, colonoscopies, biopsies, X-rays of all sorts, CT scans, MRIs, stopping only at SATs. I am not keen to discover ailments that don’t bother me. At the age of eighty-seven, I figure I am playing with house money, and I have no wish to upset the house by prodding my health in search of imperfections any more than is absolutely necessary.

The older one gets, unless one’s life is lived in pain or deepest regret, the more fortunate one feels. Not always, not everyone, I suppose. “The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum,” said George Bernard Shaw, who lived to age ninety-four. Though the world seems to be in a hell of a shape just now, I nonetheless prefer to delay my exit for as long as I can. I like it here, continue to find much that is interesting and amusing, and have no wish to depart the planet.

Still, with advancing years I have found my interests narrowing. Not least among my waning interests is that in travel. I like my domestic routine too much to abandon it for foreign countries where the natives figure to be wearing Air Jordan shoes, Ralph Lauren shirts, and cargo pants. Magazines that I once looked forward to, many of which I have written for in the past, no longer contain much that I find worth reading. A former moviegoer, I haven’t been to a movie theater in at least a decade. The high price of concert and opera tickets has driven me away. The supposedly great American playwrights—Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee—have never seemed all that good to me, and I miss them not at all. If all this sounds like a complaint that the culture has deserted me, I don’t feel that it has. I can still listen to my beloved Mozart on discs, read Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Willa Cather, and the other great novelists, watch the splendid movies of earlier days on Turner Classics and HBO—live, in other words, on the culture of the past.

“Vho needs dis?” Igor Stravinsky is supposed to have remarked when presented with some new phenomena of the avant-garde or other work in the realm of art without obvious benefit. “Vho needs dis?” is a question that occurred to me more than once or twice as I wrote my autobiography. All I can say is that those who read my autobiography will read of the life of a man lucky enough to have devoted the better part of his days to fitting words together into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays and stories on a wide variety of topics. Now in his autobiography all the sentences and paragraphs are about his own life. He hopes that these sentences are well made, these paragraphs have a point, and together they attain to a respectable truth quotient, containing no falsehoods whatsoever. He hopes that, on these modest grounds at least, his autobiography qualifies as worth reading.

Joseph Epstein is author of Gallimaufry , a collection of essays and reviews.

Image by Museum Rotterdam on Wikimedia Commons , licensed via Creative Commons . Image cropped.

Articles by Joseph Epstein

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Piece by Piece

Follow this autobiography where Pharrell Williams shows his imaginative and creative process using Lego, as he constructs Lego models representing his artistic development. Each build reflec... Read all Follow this autobiography where Pharrell Williams shows his imaginative and creative process using Lego, as he constructs Lego models representing his artistic development. Each build reflects a different creative milestone. Follow this autobiography where Pharrell Williams shows his imaginative and creative process using Lego, as he constructs Lego models representing his artistic development. Each build reflects a different creative milestone.

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Ohtani’s former interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, had inaccuracies in public biography

ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA - MAY 08: Ippei Mizuhara, interpreter for Shohei Ohtani #17 of the Los Angeles Angels in the first inning at Angel Stadium of Anaheim on May 08, 2023 in Anaheim, California. (Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

As a brewing gambling scandal has ensnared Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, questions have arisen about the reliability of the tale’s primary narrator thus far: Ohtani’s now former interpreter and best friend, Ippei Mizuhara. Those questions have only grown, with increased scrutiny on Mizuhara revealing that key points of his publicly available biography appear to be either exaggerated or inaccurate.

For years, the Los Angeles Angels media guide lists Mizuhara as having graduated from the University of California, Riverside in 2007, and that he spent spring training in 2012 working for the New York Yankees as an interpreter for Japanese pitcher Hideki Okajima. Also, multiple news reports noted that Mizuhara served as Okajima’s interpreter in 2010 with the Boston Red Sox — where he reportedly got his first major-league opportunity.

However, as first reported by NBC Los Angeles , the university disputed the notion that Mizuhara had ever attended the school, much less having graduated. “Our university records do not show a student by the name of Ippei Mizuhara having attended UC Riverside,” a school spokesman told The Athletic .

UC Riverside did not respond when asked if it was possible Mizuhara attended the school under a different name, or if anyone with a similar name ever attended. Spokespeople representing Ohtani declined to comment when asked if they had believed Mizuhara’s biography during his tenure with Ohtani.

Meanwhile, multiple news reports show that Okajima failed a physical on Feb. 17, 2012, before spring training, when he was released by the Yankees. Mizuhara could have worked with Okajima before the official start of camp, during the month or so when players on minor-league deals might arrive early to work out. But the Angels media guide has stated annually since 2019 that Mizuhara “served as an interpreter for Hideki Okajima during Yankees Spring Training in 2012.”

Earlier this week, the Red Sox released a statement insisting that Mizuhara has never worked for the team.

“We are reaching out to all of you because of reports in various outlets stating that Ippei Mizuhara worked for the Red Sox as an interpreter, which is incorrect,” read a message from the club distributed to media members on Friday. “Mizuhara was never employed by the Boston Red Sox in any capacity and was not an interpreter for Hideki Okajima during the pitcher’s time with the team. Please know that we have thoroughly checked our files to ensure we are providing accurate information.”

Mizuhara and Okajima could not be reached for comment.

Mizhuara’s connection to Okajima seems to have been exaggerated over time. Multiple news reports have linked Mizuhara to Okajima over different periods. That includes a Nippon.com story from 2021 that said Mizuhara was Okajima’s interpreter during the 2010 season with the Red Sox. But in addition to the Red Sox’s denial, archives from the Boston Globe in April and May 2010 name Ryo Shinkawa as Okajima’s interpreter. The team’s media guide from 2010 lists two people as team interpreters that season, but not Mizuhara.

Searches on two different news databases did not bring up results featuring Mizuhara before 2018, when Ohtani first signed with the Angels.

In devising a media guide, the standard protocol requires trust between the media relations department and the rest of the employees, according to interviews with media relations staffers from other clubs, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. The media relations department does not have the time to vet the resume claims of each employee, the staffers said. A media relations staffer will often send a proposed biographic thumbnail for pre-approval to the employee, or ask the employee for biographical information in publishing the guide.

Mizuhara was terminated from his position with the Dodgers on Wednesday after Ohtani’s representatives alleged that he stole at least $4.5 million from the two-way superstar to cover his own gambling losses. Mizuhara initially told ESPN on Tuesday that Ohtani had agreed to pay off Mizuhara’s debts, and was present when the money was wired to Matt Bowyer, the alleged bookmaker currently under federal investigation. But soon after Mizuhara spoke with ESPN, a spokesman for Ohtani recanted the account and said that Ohtani had not been aware of Mizuhara’s gambling activity.

The Associated Press reported that the IRS has opened a criminal investigation into Mizuhara. ESPN reported that Ohtani’s representatives have initiated a criminal complaint against Mizuhara, but declined to state which agency. Major League Baseball announced on Friday that it opened a formal investigation into the situation.

Until these recent events, the 39-year-old Mizuhara had been the most prominent of a small group of interpreters working with Asian players in Major League Baseball . He was seen as Ohtani’s right-hand man, always at the side of the two-way superstar, and he was one of the most public-facing people in the sport.

— The Athletic ’s Mike Vorkunov, Andy McCullough and Brendan Kuty contributed to this story.

A curious throng awaits Shohei Ohtani's statement, and gets more than they expected

(Top photo of Ippei Mizuhara: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)

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Sam Blum is a staff writer for The Athletic covering the Los Angeles Angels. Before joining The Athletic, he was a sports reporter for the Dallas Morning News. Previously, he covered Auburn for AL.com and the University of Virginia for The Daily Progress in Charlottesville.

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Autobiography Of A Newspaper
In this video, I have shared journey of a newspaper in english. Hope you all love the video.Here you will learn English through stories, essays, speech, poem...
What Is an Autobiography? (And How to Write Yours)
The word autobiography literally means SELF (auto), LIFE (bio), WRITING (graph). Or, in other words, an autobiography is the story of someone's life written or otherwise told by that person. When writing your autobiography, find out what makes your family or your experience unique and build a narrative around that.
Margery Kempe, the first English autobiographer, goes online
Alison Flood. Laying claim to being the first autobiography ever written in English, the "extraordinary" life story of the medieval mystic Margery Kempe, which exists in only one known copy, has ...
Autobiography of a Newspaper
Autobiography of a Newspaper. Just out of the printing press I smell wonderful. I smell strongly of ink and I am also very warm to hold. Its not just me though. Even my friends smella and feel the same. That's why they are my family. This is my first day of life. My excitement undeniable. I am now stacked on top of my friends and bound by a rope.
Autobiography
The earliest known autobiography written in English is the Book of Margery Kempe, written in 1438. Following in the earlier tradition of a life story told as an act of Christian witness, ... With the rise of education, cheap newspapers and cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop, and the beneficiaries of this were ...
The Autobiography Of A Newspaper Essay in English// Essay on The
The Autobiography Of A Newspaper Essay in English// Essay on The Autobiography Of A Newspaper. English Essay writing in English. One page writing in English....
Franklin's Autobiography
A book-length English edition, The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, was published in London in 1793, a year after it had already appeared in German and Swedish. This English version was, however, a translation back into English from the 1791 French, so that the still-partial twice-translated text differed considerably from Franklin ...
autobiography
autobiography in Newspapers, printing, publishing topic. From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English autobiography au‧to‧bi‧og‧ra‧phy / ˌɔːtəbaɪˈɒɡrəfi $ ˌɒːtəbaɪˈɑː-/ noun (plural autobiographies) [countable, uncountable] AL TCN STORY a book in which someone writes about their own life, or books of this type → biography see thesaurus at book ...
Autobiography Of A Book
Lastly, a key element of an autobiography is the use of sensory detail to convey a sense of place and time. This is important for allowing the reader to imagine the world of the author and connect with their story. 5. Style. As a genre of narrative writing, autobiography is quite similar to fiction.
Writing My Autobiography by Joseph Epstein
Autobiography is a complex enterprise, calling for its author not only to know himself but to be honest in conveying that knowledge. ... Yet a few years after the essay was published, I was offered a job teaching in the English Department of Northwestern University, and the year after that, I was appointed editor of the American Scholar. Today ...
Kim Mulkey: Washington Post report on LSU head coach an ...
The Washington Post on Saturday released an in-depth profile of Louisiana State University women's basketball head coach Kim Mulkey, which paints the coach as a leader with single-minded ...
Joe Lieberman, a Top Democrat Who Turned on the Party, Dies at 82
Joe Lieberman, the US senator and vice presidential nominee whose voyage from reliable liberal to stubborn centrist led him to abandon the Democratic Party at a time of political polarization ...
Piece by Piece (2024)
Piece by Piece: Directed by Morgan Neville. With Pharrell Williams. Follow this autobiography where Pharrell Williams shows his imaginative and creative process using Lego, as he constructs Lego models representing his artistic development. Each build reflects a different creative milestone.
Ohtani's former interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, had inaccuracies in public
Also, multiple news reports noted that Mizuhara served as Okajima's interpreter in 2010 with the Boston Red Sox — where he reportedly got his first major-league opportunity.
You Can't Fire Only the White Guys
David Duvall spent five years as a senior vice president at Novant Health, a multibillion-dollar medical group based in North Carolina. His firing in July 2018 shocked his colleagues, the Fourth ...
time to start typing like a grownup
Workplace; time to start typing like a grownup many acknowledge capitalizing letters as a rite of passage, but there are holdouts