Best of
Memoir

1962

Underfoot in Show Business


Helene Hanff - 1962
    Each year there are hundreds of stagestruck kids arrive in New York determined to crash the theatre, firmly convinced they're destined to be famous Broadway stars or playwrights.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America


John Steinbeck - 1962
    Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and the unexpected kindness of strangers.

The Lonely Life


Bette Davis - 1962
    The Hollywood legend talks about her four marriages, her leading men, her feud with a well-known co-star, her longing to have a child, and her favorite roles.

The Trouble with Angels


Jane Trahey - 1962
    originally published with the title: Life with Mother Superior

The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau: In Fourteen Volumes Bound as Two: Vols. VIII–XIV


Henry David Thoreau - 1962
    A major document in 19th-century American literature, the journals are sourcebooks for many Thoreau works including "Walden." Hundreds of entries on birds, flowers, nature, philosophical topics. An extraordinary record of Thoreau's life and thought.

The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau: In Fourteen Volumes Bound as Two: Vols. I–VII


Henry David Thoreau - 1962
    A major document in 19th-century American literature, the journals are sourcebooks for many Thoreau works including "Walden." Hundreds of entries on birds, flowers, nature, philosophical topics. An extraordinary record of Thoreau's life and thought.

88 Men and 2 Women


Clinton T. Duffy - 1962
    Duffy while he was warden at San Quentin. From the psychopathic Caryl Chessman, who managed to postpone his fate for twelve long years, to Leslie Gireth, who wanted to hear the haunting strains of "Clair de Lune" as he walked into the gas chamber, these ninety criminals were all human beings whose strengths and virtues as well as guilt are fully etched by the man who shared their last days. With warmth and compassion, and not without considerable humor, Clinton T. Duffy has, with Al Hirshberg, written a dramatic saga of life on Death Row that will haunt any reader."

I Will Survive


Sala Pawlowicz - 1962
    From 1939, when the Nazis marched into her village in Poland, to her liberation in 1945, Sala Kaminska's life was filled with the horror of starvation, whippings and near escapes from death. . . . Her account of forced marches and the brutality of her captors in Bergen-Belsen and other concentration camps is deceptively simple -- not understated but factual and straightforward, with a minimum of histrionics. The facts need no embellishment. . . .

Wolf Willow


Wallace Stegner - 1962
    Set in Cypress Hills in southern Saskatchewan, where Stegner's family homesteaded from 1914 to 1920, Wolf Willow: A History, a Story & a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier brings to life both the pioneer community and the magnificent landscape that surrounds it. This Twentieth-Century Classics edition includes a new introductory essay by Page Stegner.

Life Among the Surrealists


Matthew Josephson - 1962
    

The Anatomy Of Britain


Anthony Sampson - 1962
    

The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs


Bryher - 1962
    Amidst the intellectual circles of the twenties and thirties, she develops relationships with her longtime partner H. D., and with Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, and others. This compelling memoir reveals Bryher's exotic childhood, her impact on modernism, and her sense of social justice-helping over 100 people escape from the Nazis while fleeing the war herself.