Truth & Beauty
by Ann Patchett | 
The Liars' Club
by Mary Karr | 
Borrowed Time
by Paul Monette | 
Trials of the Earth
by Mary Mann Hamilton | 
Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat
by Victoria Fedden | 
Becoming a Man
by Paul Monette | 
The Pornographer's Daughter
by Kristin Battista-Frazee | 
Widening Circles
by Joanna Macy | 
Heart Berries
by Terese Marie Mailhot | 
Glitter and Glue
by Kelly Corrigan | 
All the Wrong Places
by Philip Connors | 
Burning the Days
by James Salter | 
Sex Death Enlightenment
by Mark Matousek | 
An American Childhood
by Annie Dillard | 
Leaving Glorytown
by Eduardo F. Calcines | 
You Have Given Me a Country
by Neela Vaswani | 
Compass Points
by Edward Hoagland | 
Beam Ends
by Errol Flynn | 
Memorial Drive
by Natasha Trethewey | 
A House Full of Daughters
by Juliet Nicolson |
In Modern American Memoirs, two very discerning writers and readers have selected samples from 35 of the finest memoirs written in this century, including contributions by such diverse writers as Margaret Mead, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong Kingston, Loren Eisely, and Zora Neale Hurston. Chosen for their value as excellent examples of the art of biography as well as for their superb writing, the excerpts present a broad range of American life, and offer vivid insight into the real-life events that shaped their authors. Here, readers can learn about the time when Harry Crews, playing as a boy, fell into a vat of boiling water with a dead hog; Chris Offutt joined the circus and watched a tattooed woman swallow a fluorescent light; and Frank Conroy practiced yo-yo tricks.