Subject

Memoir

Lives told in the first person, kept as literature and as history. A catalog should say whose voice you are opening, then send you to Open Library to hear it.

Walden

by Henry David Thoreau

1854 · Memoir · Philosophy

Thoreau’s account of two years in a cabin by Walden Pond, arranged by season and by argument. It is a book about economy in the old sense: how a life is furnished.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

by Frederick Douglass

1845 · Memoir

Douglass describes enslavement in Maryland, the fight to read, and his escape. He published the Narrative to answer readers who claimed no one in bondage could have written it.

The Souls of Black Folk

by W. E. B. Du Bois

1903 · Memoir

Essays on reconstruction, education, music, and what Du Bois named double consciousness. The book argues, and it also remembers.