27 articles
A. C. Benson
Arthur Christopher Benson (April 24, 1862 – June 17, 1925), usually published as A. C. Benson, was an English author, diarist, and educator. He served as master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, from.
Alexandre Exquemelin
Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin (c. 1645–1707), also John Esquemeling, French barber-surgeon and buccaneer chronicler; wrote De Americaensche Zee-Rovers (1678), The Buccaneers of America, the key eyewitness source on Caribbean piracy and Henry Morgan.
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977), French-born American diarist and novelist. Began her diary at 11 in 1914, producing 35,000 pages; published in seven edited volumes, four Early Diary volumes, and eight posthumous unexpurgated volumes; also wrote erotic fiction.
Anne Lister
Anne Lister (1791–1840), Yorkshire landowner and diarist of Shibden Hall, Halifax, called the first modern lesbian; her four-to-five-million-word diary, partly in cipher, records her relationships with women, estate management, and mountaineering firsts.
Billy Hayes (writer)
Billy Hayes (born 1947) is the American writer of Midnight Express (1977), the memoir of his 1970 hashish arrest in Istanbul, five years in Turkish prisons, and his escape from Imrali Island, later an Oscar-winning 1978 film he has publicly criticized for distorting his story.
Dave Pelzer
Dave Pelzer (David James Pelzer, born 1960) is the American author of the 1995 abuse memoir A Child Called "It" and its sequels, a bestselling self-help writer, motivational speaker, and Jefferson Award recipient whose account has been disputed by one brother and supported by another.
David Unaipon
David Unaipon (Ngunaitponi), 1872–1967, Ngarrindjeri preacher, inventor, and first published Aboriginal author from Point McLeay Mission, South Australia; patented a 1909 sheep-shearing handpiece, wrote Native Legends (1929), and appears on the Australian $50 note.
Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) was a British diarist, prose writer, and poet, sister of William Wordsworth, whose Grasmere journals recorded Lake District life and fed his poetry.
Fanny Knight
Fanny Knight (Frances Catherine Austen Knight, Lady Knatchbull, 1793–1882) was Jane Austen's favourite niece, whose diaries and letters are a key biographical source and who likely annotated the family Baronetage used for Persuasion.
Fauna Hodel
Fauna Hodel was an American author and motivational speaker known for her 2008 memoir, One Day She'll Darken. It details her connection to Dr. George Hodel.
Giacomo Casanova
Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), Venetian adventurer and author of the French memoirs Histoire de ma vie; librarian at Dux, escaped the Piombi prison in 1756, and gave his name to the archetype of the seducer.
Horace Walpole
Horace Walpole (1717-1797), youngest son of Britain's first Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, wrote The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel, built Strawberry Hill, founded the Strawberry Hill Press, and coined 'serendipity'.
Jahanara Imam
Jahanara Imam (জাহানারা ইমাম, 1929–1994), honored as Shaheed Janani, was a Bengali writer and teacher whose day-by-day diary of the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war became an immediate bestseller.
Jan Chryzostom Pasek
Jan Chryzostom Pasek (c. 1636 – 1701) was a Polish soldier and memoirist whose vivid Memoirs depict seventeenth-century warfare and noble life in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
John Bunyan
John Bunyan (1628–1688), English Nonconformist tinker-turned-preacher jailed twelve years in Bedford, wrote about sixty books including The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Grace Abounding (1666), and The Holy War (1682).
Mahadev Desai
Mahadev Desai (મહાદેવ દેસાઈ, 1892–1942) was an Indian independence activist, journalist, and writer who served as Mahatma Gandhi's personal secretary from 1917 until his death.
Margot Asquith
Margot Asquith, née Tennant (1864–1945), Countess of Oxford and Asquith, British political hostess, diarist, and author; second wife of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, known for her candid two-volume autobiography (1920, 1922) and Great War diary.
Monika Mann
Monika Mann (1910–1992), German writer, feuilletonist, and pianist, fourth of six children of Thomas and Katia Mann; survivor of the 1940 City of Benares sinking that drowned her husband Jenő Lányi, and author of the 1956 memoir Vergangenes und Gegenwärtiges.
Ninon de l'Enclos
Ninon de l'Enclos (Anne de Lenclos, c. 1620–1705) was a French courtesan, Epicurean letter writer, and salonnière of Louis XIV's Paris; her salon at the Hôtel de Sagonne drew Molière, Saint-Évremond, and Racine, and her Sévigné letters are spurious.
Samson Occom
Samson Occom (1723–1792), Mohegan Presbyterian minister and fund-raiser for Dartmouth College, author of A Short Narrative of My Life and the Moses Paul execution sermon, and founder of the Brothertown Indian community.
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), English naval administrator, wrote the famous diary 1660–1669 in Shelton shorthand, recording the Restoration, plague, and Great Fire of London; first published 1825, complete 1970–83.
Sei Shōnagon
Sei Shōnagon (清少納言) was a Japanese waka poet and court gentlewoman who served Empress Teishi in the mid-Heian period and wrote The Pillow Book, which established the zuihitsu essay genre.
Tehmina Durrani
Tehmina Durrani (تہمینہ درانی), born 1953, Pakistani author, artist, and women's rights activist; wrote the bestselling banned autobiography My Feudal Lord (1991) about her marriage to Ghulam Mustafa Khar, later married Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and served as First Lady.
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), English Romantic essayist, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), the first autobiographical account of drug addiction; also wrote Recollections of the Lake Poets and Suspiria de Profundis.
Vyvyan Holland
Vyvyan Holland (Vyvyan Oscar Beresford Wilde, 1886-1967), second son of Oscar Wilde and Constance Lloyd; name changed to Holland in 1895; writer, translator, author of Son of Oscar Wilde (1954).
Zhang Dai
Zhang Dai (张岱, 1597–?1684), literary name Tao'an, was a Chinese essayist, historian, and biographer from Shaoxing, Zhejiang, whose reminiscences made him a late-Ming master of the short essay.
Zitkala-Sa
Zitkala-Sa, also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was a Yankton Dakota Sioux writer and activist who wrote the earliest published autobiographical accounts of American Indian boarding school life.