Books like The Autobiography of Malcolm X

01

Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela · Memoir

Nelson Mandela's autobiography traces his life from a rural Xhosa childhood in the Transkei to his release from prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years of incarceration, and ends with his election as South Africa's first democratically chosen president in 1994.

02

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou · Memoir

Maya Angelou's first volume of autobiography covers her childhood and adolescence in Stamps, Arkansas and San Francisco during the 1930s and 1940s, ending with the birth of her son at age sixteen.

03

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan Stevenson · Memoir

Bryan Stevenson's memoir of his career as a capital defense attorney in Alabama, and specifically of his years working on the case of Walter McMillian — a Black man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Monroe County, Alabama — is simultaneously a riveting legal narrative and a sustained moral argument about the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor and of Black defendants.

04

10% Happier

Dan Harris · Memoir

10% Happier is Dan Harris's account of discovering meditation after a panic attack live on Good Morning America in 2004 forced him to confront an anxiety problem he'd been managing with cocaine and a punishing work schedule.

05

A Grief Observed

C. S. Lewis · Memoir

A Grief Observed is C.

06

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers · Memoir

Dave Eggers's debut memoir about losing both parents to cancer within five weeks and raising his younger brother Toph while trying to start a literary magazine in San Francisco in the mid-1990s arrived in 2000 with unusual self-consciousness about its own nature.