A first-person memoir of growing up and working in colonial East Africa, told through episodic accounts of life on farms, training racehorses, and learning to fly.

Richard Wright's Black Boy is a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood, following life in the segregated American South and his later move to Chicago where he begins a writing career and political engagement.

A firsthand memoir of growing up Black and poor in mid-20th-century rural Mississippi, following the author's life from childhood into her twenties.

A first-volume autobiographical account of Maya Angelou’s early life, following her from early childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, through adolescence and into young motherhood. The narrative traces how encounters with racism, personal trauma, and steady literary influences shape her sense of self and dignity.

A book-length series of linked essays that record extended, close observations of the natural world around a creek and turn those observations into philosophical and lyrical reflections on life, perception, and the human place in nature.

A first-person account of growing up between Chinese folktales and American life, where family history and mythic stories intertwine with recollections of childhood.

An extended piece of narrative journalism that follows postwar U.S. test pilots and the first astronauts selected for Project Mercury, probing why these men accepted extreme danger and how American aviation and space culture valorized risk.

A first-person life account that traces a Black lesbian’s development from childhood into adulthood, attending to family, work, lovers, and the communities that shaped her.

Jill Ker Conway recounts her childhood on a vast sheep station in western New South Wales and the disruptions—most notably drought and her father's death—that forced her family to leave for Sydney.