"Autobiographical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 54. Two autobiographical works, the Malfuzat and the Tuzukat, are attributed to Timur and probably were composed under his direction. The latter was translated by Major Davey (Oxford, 1783), and the former, in part, by Major Stewart (Or. Transl. Fund, 1830). An independent version of the portion of the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... that his head was full of plots the supply seemed to have run thin by the time he set to work on The Martian. The value of this book rests with its autobiographical character. The knot is not tied in the first half and unravelled in the second, after the approved manner in which plots should be woven. The story is chiefly a record of people and places, vivid, and written in a breathless, chatty style. It somewhat resembles the conversation ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... of information respecting Carlyle's manner of living and personal history during these earlier years in London may be gleaned incidentally from his "Life of John Sterling," a book, which, from the nature of it, is necessarily partly autobiographical. ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... of the scene to Saint-Prosper, and the soldier became collaborator, "abandoning, as it were," wrote the manager in his autobiographical date-book and diary, "the sword for the pen, and the glow of the Champ de Mars for the glimmer of a kerosene lamp." And yet not with the inclination of Burgoyne, or other military gentlemen who have courted ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... the excitement and speculation it had aroused in trade circles. Claude Ditmar's ability to put it through was unquestioned; one had only to look at him,—tenacity, forcefulness, executiveness were written all over him.... In addition, the article contained much material of an autobiographical nature that must—Janet thought—have been supplied by Ditmar himself, whose modesty had evidently shrunk from the cruder self-eulogy of an interview. But ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... two people who annoy an author more than any others—the person who calmly supposes that everything he writes is biographical, or even autobiographical, and the person who declares, "I've got a dandy plot for you"—and proceeds to ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... autobiography, taking him back again to Main-Travelled Roads and its cycle, were personal, lyrical, and consequently universal. All along, it now appeared, he had been at his best when he was most nearly autobiographical: those vivid early stories had come from the lives of his own family or of their neighbors; Rose of Dutcher's Coolly had set forth what was practically his own experience in its account of a heroine—not hero—who ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... wheel-skating; I have made great advance in it of late, can do a good many amusing things (I mean amusing in MY sense - amusing to do). You know, I lose all my forenoons at Court! So it is, but the time passes; it is a great pleasure to sit and hear cases argued or advised. This is quite autobiographical, but I feel as if it was some time since we met, and I can tell you, I am glad to meet you again. In every way, you see, but that of work the world goes well with me. My health is better than ever it was before; I get on without any jar, nay, as if there ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... authority of a distinguished seaman of Nelson's time. Departing this life as Admiral of the Fleet on the eve of the Crimean War, Sir Thomas Byam Martin has recorded for us amongst his all too short autobiographical notes these few characteristic words uttered by one young man of the many who must have felt that particular inconvenience ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... sell, but a more modern taste would choose to put them in a place by themselves, not in a collection of old ballads. An essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad was written, as were the Remarks on Popular Poetry, for the 1833 edition. It is chiefly interesting for its autobiographical matter, though it also contains criticisms of Burns and other writers of ballad poetry—"a species of literary labour which the author has himself pursued with some success."[67] Scott's statement that the ballad style was very popular at the time he began to write, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... says Fleay; "some as several poems—of groups of sonnets; some as containing a separate poem in each sonnet. They have been supposed to be written in Shakespeare's own person, or in the character of another, or of several others; to be autobiographical or heterobiographical or allegorical; to have been addressed to Lord Southampton, to Sir William Herbert, to his own wife, to Lady Rich, to his child, to himself, to his Muse." The safest and wisest ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... mastering shorthand he has written feelingly in that novel which contains so much autobiographical material—David Copperfield. "I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography ... and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... sense autobiographical. But while other self-recording creatures are permitted at least to seem to change the subject, apparently nobody cares what I think of the tariff, the conservation of our natural resources, or the conflicts which revolve about the name of Dreyfus. If I offer to reform the education system ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... contains all the essays on flies, or Diptera, from the Souvenirs entomologiques, to which I have added, in order to make the dimensions uniform with those of the other volumes of the series, the purely autobiographical essays comprised in the Souvenirs. These essays, though they have no bearing upon the life of the fly, are among the most interesting that Henri Fabre has written and will, I am persuaded, make a special appeal to the reader. The chapter entitled The Caddis Worm has been included as following ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... to signalize their conversion from heathen darkness by a Mediterranean venture, combining the characters of a piratical cruise and a pious pilgrimage. But if publisher and client were justified in believing that they had discovered an autobiographical El Dorado, they were, none the less, ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... fourteen years old when he first went to sea. That is his own statement, and it is one of the few of his autobiographical utterances that we need not doubt. From it, and from a knowledge of certain other dates, we are able to construct some vague picture of his doings before he left Italy and settled in Portugal. Already in his young heart he was feeling the influence that was to direct and shape his ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... a biography of Sterne are by no means abundant. Of the earlier years of his life the only existing record is that preserved in the brief autobiographical memoir which, a few months before his death, he composed, in the usual quaint staccato style of his familiar correspondence, for the benefit of his daughter. Of his childhood; of his school-days; of his life at Cambridge, and in his Yorkshire vicarage; of his whole history, in fact, up ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... Petrarch has truly drawn the life of love. So with Rossetti's sonnets. They may or may not be "occasional." Many readers who enter with sympathy into the series of feelings they present will doubtless insist upon regarding them as autobiographical. Others, who think they see the stamp of reality upon them, will perhaps accept them (as Hallam accepted the Sonnets of Shakspeare) as witnesses of excessive affection, redeemed sometimes by touches of nobler ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... 1770. His father, John Wordsworth, was the agent of Sir J. Lowther, who later became the first Earl of Lonsdale. At the age of eight the boy was sent to school at Hawkshead. The impressions of his boyhood period are related in the autobiographical poem, The Prelude, (written 1805, published 1850), and from this poetical record we discern how strong the influences of Nature were to shape and develop his imagination. Wordsworth's father died in 1783, leaving the family poorly provided for. The main asset was a considerable claim ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... classical education; it was therefore conformable to my wishes that I was taken from school and served a long apprenticeship to a silver-plate engraver." This is printed in Allan Cunningham's Life of Hogarth, together with many more extracts from autobiographical memoranda, from which we may learn at first hand a great deal of information bearing on the state of painting at this period, and the circumstances under which it received such a stimulus from Hogarth, before the sun had fully risen (in the ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... fortunately remains this unfinished sketch of youth, prepared by her own hand, in 1840, as the introductory chapter to an autobiographical romance. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Mr. Brock hinted in the little autobiographical sketch which we gave in a former chapter, incarcerated for a certain period, and for certain other debts, in the donjons of Shrewsbury; but he released himself from them by that noble and consolatory method of whitewashing which the law has provided for gentlemen in his oppressed condition; and he ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... remarkable, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favored the reader—inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... reputation, as a writer, in the matter of this particular comedy, is no less apparent from the very unusual personal explanation he offered for it, soon after the brief run of the play was over. For no man was more shy of autobiographical revelations. His biographers are continually reduced to gleaning stray hints, here and there, concerning his private life. [5] And therefore we can measure by this emergence from a habitual personal reticence the soreness with which he now published work unworthy of his genius. ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... on which he sat and began to think it was a dangerous place for me, since I was certain that every word was distinctly heard by Barboza; yet he made no sign, but went on swaying from side to side as if no mocking word had reached him, then launched out in one of his most atrocious decimas, autobiographical and philosophical. In the first stanza he mentions that he had slain eleven men, but using a poet's license he states the fact in a roundabout way, saying that he slew six men, and then five more, making ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... intimate self-analysis and intense self-reproach, and the less well-known De Vita Propria Liber by Cardan. This latter is a serious attempt at scientific self-examination. Recently, attention has been directed to the accumulation of autobiographical and biographical materials which are interpreted from the point of view of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The study Der Fall Otto Weininger by Dr. Ferdinand Probst is a representative monograph of this type. The outstanding ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... title is given at the beginning of this section had been written several years before the date of its publication. It is a great advance in certain respects over the first novel, but wants the peculiar interest which belonged to that as a partially autobiographical memoir. The story is no longer disjointed and impossible. It is carefully studied in regard to its main facts. It has less to remind us of "Vivian Grey" and "Pelham," and more that recalls "Woodstock" and "Kenilworth." The personages were ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... respect for Punch's influence at that time, as well as his desire to temper the ardour of its attacks if not to secure its silence, for he there explains how the hero, who to some degree at least is to be considered an autobiographical study, "flattered himself that 'Scaramouche'" would regard him in a more friendly spirit. Punch, with pardonable pride, devoted a cartoon to this pointed reference, but merely remarking, "H'm—he did flatter himself," abated not one jot ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... the climax of irritation is reached when, having troubled to write down autobiographical details, having wrestled with your modesty and overthrown it, having posted your letter and prepaid it, the —— editor rejects your contribution without thanks. This hard fate overtook me—moi qui vous parle—not very long ago. The conductor of a penny journal, not ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... and stories which Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley left in manuscript,[i] only one novelette, Mathilda, is complete. It exists in both rough draft and final copy. In this story, as in all Mary Shelley's writing, there is much that is autobiographical: it would be hard to find a more self-revealing work. For an understanding of Mary's character, especially as she saw herself, and of her attitude toward Shelley and toward Godwin in 1819, this tale is an important ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... THE IRISH PEASANTRY. A new Pictorial Edition, with an Autobiographical Introduction, Explanatory Notes, and numerous Illustrations on Wood and Steel, by ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... could send to her—novels, for which she confessed to a great liking; poems, political pamphlets, newspapers, all that came to her hand. Her longest and greatest poem, Aurora Leigh, was written during her Italian years. While the story of the poem is in no sense autobiographical, the heroine is in her beliefs and her ideals Mrs. Browning's self, and this was the poem by which she felt herself most ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Dio, quest' anno in terra del Langravio di Hassia insieme con la moglie et figliuoli tutti miserabilmente, et come da miracolo, in gran calamita son crepati." Aleander to Sanga, Brussels, November 25, 1531, Vatican Library, Laemmer, Monumenta, 90. See Lambert's autobiographical sketch, entitled: "Rationes propter quas Minoritarum conversationem habitumque rejecit," Gerdes., iv. (Doc.) 21-28, and translated, Herminjard, i. 118, etc.; F. W. Hassencamp, Fr. Lambert von Avignon; Haag, France prot., s. ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Washington Irving, whose writings are similar in style to those of Goldsmith, has extended and perpetuated his reputation in America by writing his Biography; a charming work, many touches of which seem almost autobiographical, as displaying the resemblance between the writer ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... important correspondence of the two great musicians will be found in the following extract from an autobiographical sketch written by Wagner in 1851. It has been frequently quoted, but cannot be quoted too often, describing, as it does, the beginning and the development of a friendship which is unique in the ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... father, "The Lyons Mail," "Charles I.," and "The Bells." Mr. Irving distinctly inherits Sir Henry Irving's ability both as an actor and as a thoughtful student of acting as an art. In 1905 he gave a lecture, largely autobiographical, to the Academy of Dramatic Art in London. It appeared in the Fortnightly Review, May, 1905, and is republished by Small, Maynard & Co., Boston, in "Occasional Papers. Dramatic and Historical" by Mr. Irving. By his kindness, and that of his publishers, its ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... dwelt rather at length on this drama on account of the real value of its thought and, above all, on account of what one may call its autobiographical interest. It was at this time that Strauss's mind began to take more definite form. His further experience will develop that form still more, but without making any ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... at Guildford, on the 17th of August. Its history and issue may best be told in the words of an autobiographical fragment, written by Lord Dundonald shortly before his death. "I was accompanied to Guildford," he said, "by Sir Francis Burdett and several other leading inhabitants of Westminster, whose names are forgotten by me. I took neither ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... revealing his immortal soul. But he is not so inhuman in his art as some of his admirers have held him to be. Mr. Hueffer, I think, has described him as pitiless, and even cruel. But can one call Daisy Miller pitiless? Or What Maisie Knew? Certainly, those autobiographical volumes, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, which may be counted among the most wonderful of the author's novels, are pervaded by exquisite affections which to a pitiless nature would ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... story of her childhood and tried to interpret her own personality in her autobiographical story, 'The One I Knew Best of All.' She has pictured a little English girl in a comfortable Manchester home, leading a humdrum, well-regulated existence, with brothers and sisters, nurse and governess. But an alert imagination added interest to the life of this "Small Person," ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... England since 1816. The poets met in the best of humor, and on terms of hearty good-fellowship—Moore staying with Byron for five or six days. On taking leave of him, Byron presented the Irish lyrist with the MS. of his autobiographical memoirs stipulating that they should not be published till after the donor's death: at a later date he became anxious that they should remain wholly unpublished. Moore sold the MS. in 1831 to Murray for L2100, after some negotiations with Longman, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... In his autobiographical sketch the poet tells us that, "The farm proved a ruinous bargain. I was the eldest of seven children, and (p. 005) my father, worn out by early hardship, was unfit for labour. His spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a freedom in the lease in two years more; and to weather ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... pounded the table and boomed his echoes of old songs, and then, forgetting these, would renew his friendly railleries, or perhaps, turning to Mary Vertrees, who sat near him, round the corner of the table at his right, he would become autobiographical. Gentlemen less naive than he had paid her that tribute, for she was a girl who inspired the autobiographical impulse in every man who met her—it needed but the ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... Baltic, in or near the town, Nexo, from which his final name is derived. There, too, he was a shoemaker's apprentice, like Pelle in the second part of the book, which resembles many great novels in being largely autobiographical. Later, he gained his livelihood as a bricklayer, until he somehow managed to get to one of the most renowned of our "people's high-schools," where he studied so effectually that he was enabled to become a teacher, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... that," said Miss White. "At least it seems to." She sighed and added, "My partners have been very autobiographical to-night." ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... chest of drawers and dressing-table, he would cast frequent affectionate glances at his double, now in the glass of the armoire, now in that above the chimney. He was favouring me meantime with a running monologue of an autobiographical complexion. ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... its intense expression in lyrical love-poetry, one of the most enduring forms of literature because of its elementariness and universality; but it is also found in other parts of the emotional field. In seeking concrete material for lyrical use the poet may take some autobiographical incident, but commonly the world of inanimate nature yields the most plastic mould. It is a marvellous victory of the spirit over matter when it takes the stars of heaven and the flowers of earth and makes them utter forth its speech, less as it seems in words of human language ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... "Selim" disguised as "Achmet," in Browne's 'Barbarossa'. In the winter season of 1804-5, when he appeared at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, such crowds collected to see him, that the military were called out to preserve order. Leslie ('Autobiographical Recollections', vol. i. p. 218) speaks of him as a boy "of handsome features and graceful manners, with a charming voice." Fox, who saw him in 'Hamlet', said, "This is finer than Garrick" ('Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers', p. 88). ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... on occasion, and the art of expression was important, perhaps indispensable, in his political success. He read deeply in the law and in books on public questions. For general literature he had little time, either during his early struggles or after his public life began, and his autobiographical memorandum contains the significant words: "Education defective." But these more significant words are found in a letter which he wrote to Hackett, the player: "Some of Shakespeare's plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... read it. The pang was present again, but how much more sober and autumnal—like your volume. Let me tell you a story, or remind you of a story. In the year of grace something or other, anything between '76 and '78, I mentioned to you in my usual autobiographical and inconsiderate manner that I was hard up. You said promptly that you had a balance at your banker's, and could make it convenient to let me have a cheque, and I accepted and got the money—how much was it?—twenty ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... infancy. But the oldest Volksbuch was written nearly forty years after the death of Faustus, and Widmann's work appeared even ten years later,—both, indeed, professing to be founded on the Doctor's writings, as well as on an autobiographical manuscript, discovered in his library after his death. Perhaps, however, the assertion of two of his contemporaries, one of whom was personally acquainted with him, is more entitled to credit in this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... emotional interest in statues is by no means uncommon among young men during adolescence. Heine, in Florentine Nights, records the experiences of a boy who conceived a sentimental love for a statue, and, as this book appears to be largely autobiographical, the incident may have been founded on fact. Youths have sometimes masturbated before statues, and even before the image of the Virgin; such cases are known to priests and mentioned in manuals for ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and in which he published his Rimas, there appeared one of the first versions of the Intermezzo,[1] and it is not unlikely that in imitation of the Intermezzo he was led to string his Rimas like beads upon the connecting thread of a common autobiographical theme. In the seventy-six short poems that compose his Rimas, Becquer tells "a swiftly-moving, passionate story of youth, love, treachery, despair, and final submission." "The introductory poems are meant to represent a stage of absorption in the beauty and complexity ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... sent in a letter, which possesses much autobiographical interest, to the Committee of Public Instruction, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... poor Reed's hands, in all surety, were very, very idle. Moreover, unless she went out greedily in search of fresh variety, how could she bring it into his present prison? If she spent too much time with him, inevitably they would exhaust their fund of gossip. Then they would be driven into becoming autobiographical, and that would be the finish of ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... portraiture, consciously or unconsciously fashioned the Tolstoy legend, as did Richard Wagner the Wagner legend, Victor Hugo the Hugo legend. Men of genius and imagination are nearly all play-actors in matters autobiographical. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... projection of certain features of the writer into all and sundry of his important characters, thus imparts, if not an air of egotism, then most certainly a somewhat constrained, if not somewhat artificial, autobiographical air—in the very midst of action, questions of ethical or casuistical character arise, all contributing to submerging individual character and its dramatic interests under a wave of but half-disguised autobiography. Let Stevenson ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... over their cigarettes both had their curiosity gratified. Captain Annersley was moved to relate some of his hair breadth escapes and thrilling moments to an alert and hero worshiping listener. And later still Ted too waxed autobiographical in response to some clever baiting of which he was entirely unaware though he did wonder afterward how he had happened to tell the thing he had kept most secret to an entire stranger. It was an immense relief to the boy to talk it all out. It would never haunt him again in quite ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... clear consciousness with which he cherished it. The most beloved of his lady friends was Isabel Fenwick, who was a frequent visitor at Rydal Mount during the last twenty years of his life. She wrote, to his dictation, the autobiographical notes used in the memoir of him. Her admiring and devoted friendship was evidently a strong inspiration and precious solace to him. It was for her sake that he built the Level Terrace, on which he paced to and fro for many an hour, in ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... great writer comparatively late in life, under the compulsion of a ruling idea which lies at the centre of all his more important works, excepting such as are apologetic and autobiographical: Nature has made man good and happy; society has made him evil and miserable. Are we, then, to return to a state of primitive savagery? No: society cannot retrograde. But in many ways we can ameliorate human life by ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Church what it is and especially those now living who receive the inheritance of the fathers and upon whose shoulders rest the responsibility of passing the work down to a new century." The editors disclaim pretension to scientific historical treatment. The work is rather biographical and autobiographical and was prepared under such a handicap that some of the matter presented could not be verified. Yet when we consider the fact that the editors had access to the files of newspapers, church histories, and other church encyclopedias, we ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... "Part Two; Autobiographical Style," he announced, with a wave of his hand. "I hopped along the Guests' Corridor, and turned into the South Corridor. I stopped at the little study. Door open; nobody there. I crossed the study to the second door, communicating ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... novel, he traces the perilously narrow line that separates love from hate; in 'Opinions de M. l'Abbe Jerome Coignard' he has given us the most radical breviary of scepticism that has appeared since Montaigne. 'Le Livre de mon Ami' is mostly autobiographical; 'Clio' (1900) contains ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the whole account of the first journey of the elder Polos, the circumstances of the second journey, and of their subsequent return occurs in the first chapter of Marco Polo's book, which is a general introduction, after which he proceeds to describe in order the lands through which he passed. This autobiographical section ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... upon the dissatisfied farmer vote is shown in the autobiographical sketches which Senators and Representatives wrote for the Congressional Directory of the Fifty-second Congress. Some who had never before held office stated the fact with apparent pride. One, who appeared from the Texas district which John H. Reagan had represented ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... Grammont was by no means autobiographical. She gave no sketches of her idiosyncrasies, and she repeated no remembered comments and prophets of her contemporaries about herself. She either concealed or she had lost any great interest in her own personality. But she was interested in ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... with Edgar Allan Poe's admirable and entrancing narrative just mentioned, are aware that it is written in autobiographical form, the facts for the most part being furnished by Pym in the shape of journal or diary entries, which are edited by Mr. Poe. For such readers it will be but a waste of time to peruse the present chapter, brief though it is. And let me further say ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... to himself as Cheyenne departed for the corral. This wayfarer, breezing in from the spaces, suggested possibilities as a character for a story No doubt the song was more or less autobiographical. "A top-hand once, but the trail for mine," seemed to explain the singer's somewhat erratic dinner schedule. Bartley thought that he would like to see more of this strange itinerant, who sang both coming into and going ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... forms the bond of union between the 'New Life,' the 'Banquet,' and the 'Divine Comedy,' and not merely as literary compositions but as autobiographical records. Dante's life and his work are not to be regarded apart; they form a single whole, and they possess a dramatic development of unparalleled consistency and unity. The course of the events of his life shaped itself in accordance ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... it was different. Although it was not published until 1818, and though it may never have been intended by its writer to have been given to the world in book form, yet it was very clearly intended to be an autobiographical legacy to his family. Hence it is no mere outpouring of the spirit upon pages meant only for the subsequent perusal of him who thus rendered in indelible characters his passing thoughts of the moment. And this being the case, comparison between the two Diaries would be just as unfair as ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... connection with the "Lowestoffe" he himself, in the short autobiographical sketch before quoted, mentions two circumstances, which, from the very fact of their remaining so long in his memory, illustrate temperament. "Even a frigate," he says, "was not sufficiently active for my mind, and I got into a schooner, tender to the Lowestoffe. ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... fled from Rome during the week after Easter, 1506. He relates the circumstances in a letter of October 1542, No. c. d. xxxv. "Le Lettere p. 489," which corroborates Condivi's story word for word, and is another proof of the autobiographical nature ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... contributors. Amongst these were some very eminent men: Mr. John Barrow of the Admiralty; the Rev. Reginald Heber, Mr. Robert Grant (afterwards Sir Robert, the Indian judge), Mr. Stephens, etc. How Mr. Barrow was induced to become a contributor is thus explained in his Autobiography. [Footnote: "Autobiographical Memoir of Sir ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... nothing more simple, homely, and attractive in literature than Franklin's autobiographical account of the first period of his life, of which we have transcribed a portion, nor nothing more indicative of the great changes which time has produced in the conditions of this country, and which it produced in the life of our author. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... is famous for his hunting exploits in Africa and in Asia. His narrative has an autobiographical basis and contains some of the most marvelous stories of adventure ever published. Col. Gordon's accounts of his various expeditions are records of bravery and endurance seldom paralleled; and the tales of bloodshed are alleviated by pleasant anecdote—the humors ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in a fragmentary manner, as much perhaps as need be told of the family from which Charles Darwin came, and may serve as an introduction to the autobiographical ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... privilege of at once becoming classical and above the age. Such for instance was the case of Bunin's solitary masterpiece The Gentleman from San Francisco, and of that wonderful series of Gorky's autobiographical books, the fourth of which appeared but a few months ago. These, however, can hardly be included in the domain of Fiction, any more than his deservedly famous Reminiscences of Tolstoy. But Gorky, and that ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... reflections always rearise in reading Goethe's autobiographical writings: first, that both the age and the place, with its ceremonies, festivals, great pomp and stirring events in close quarters in the little province where he lived, were especially adapted to educate children and absorb them in externals; and, second, that ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Thierry's Autobiographical Preface are most touching. "If, as I delight in thinking, the interest of science is counted in the number of great national interests, I have given my country all that the soldier mutilated on the field of battle gives her. Whatever may be the fate of my labours, this example I hope will ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... Buzz-Buzz. Its author, JAMES E. AGATE, has now followed it with another, called, rather grimly, Responsibility (RICHARDS). You will be absolutely correct in guessing that this is not a treatise on revue, being indeed an autobiographical novel of (I feel bound to add) precisely the same calibre as, in the sister realm of drama, made the name of Manchester at one period a word of awe. Why do these young Mancunians recollect to such stupendous purpose? Here is Mr. AGATE, with an introduction ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... I began to see a kind of beauty in him, his aplomb was so majestic. I never knew a rogue to cut so fat; his villainy was ample, like his belly, and I could scarce find it in my heart to hold him responsible for either. He was good enough to drop into the autobiographical; telling me how the farm, in spite of the war and the high prices, had proved a disappointment; how there was 'a sight of cold, wet land as you come along the 'igh-road'; how the winds and rains and the seasons had been misdirected, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... divulge my mortification. I now resign my Recordership, and shall get rid of all connection with this brutal fellow.' His last Parliamentary venture was cut short by the reflection how small was his following. How curiously after all this reads his own little autobiographical sketch in the European Magazine! 'It was generally supposed that Mr Boswell would have had a seat in Parliament; and indeed his not being amongst the Representatives of the Commons is one of those strange things ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... mentioning the subject was not taken into consideration, because such sheep cannot consider; they can only criticise. The next thing they did, therefore, was to take out the incident in the book which was most likely to damage her reputation, and declare that it was autobiographical. There was one man who knew exactly when the thing had occurred, who the characters were, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... prose there was Benjamin Constant, supremely oratorical and a very luminous orator, also a religious philosopher in his work On Religions, and a novelist in his admirable Adolphus, which was semi-autobiographical. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... conquer Rome, and to carry on the name under the title of the Holy Roman Empire. Caesar met the ancestors of those who were to be Caesars, and with an eye on Roman politics, wrote the "Commentaries," which were really autobiographical messages, with the Germans as a text and ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... Autobiographical Tracts, not included in the recent Publication of the Camden Society edited by Mr. ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... really a tale. I introduced, in order to provide interest, all sorts of accessories— aunts, parsons, gamekeepers, nurses, a fire and some hairbreadth escapes, but they were none of them essential and they were all manufactured. The only parts not worthless were those which were autobiographical. ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... been drawn from a vast mass of letters and other original documents, including some very curious autobiographical memoirs. The possession of all these papers, kindly furnished by friends and admirers of the poet, has enabled the writer to give more detail to his description than is usual in short biographies—at least in biographies of men born, like John Clare, in ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... and Youth (1855-57)—Tolstoy's first literary efforts—may be regarded as semi-autobiographical studies; if not in detail, at least in the wider sense that all his books contain pictures more or less accurate of himself and his own experiences. No plot runs through them; they simply analyse ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... authentic or not, while the circumjacent waking Actions are omitted. Anecdotes, oftenest without date of place or time, fly loosely on separate slips, like Sibylline leaves. Interspersed also are long purely Autobiographical delineations; yet without connection, without recognizable coherence; so unimportant, so superfluously minute, they almost remind us of "P.P. Clerk of this Parish." Thus does famine of intelligence alternate with waste. Selection, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... that the poem is too autobiographical and that real experience are alien things that should never influence one, but it was wrung out of me, a cry of pain, the cry of Marsyas, not the song of Apollo. Still, there are some good things in it. I feel as if ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... one can read Rousseau without being convinced that he believed what he wrote, at least at the moment of writing it. Truthfulness of this kind is quite consistent with inaccuracy, and it is probable that some incidents in Rousseau's autobiographical writings have been wrongly remembered, colored by prejudice, or embellished by vanity. Some of them may even be completely fictitious; the author caring little for facts except as the ornaments and illustrations of ideas. But what he thought in the abstract Rousseau was quite ready to write down, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... missionary student, but equally so for the general reader. The amount of information it contains, descriptive, social, evangelistic, and even political, is astonishing; and the discursive and, in part, autobiographical form in which it is written, renders it so easy, that he who runs may read. The contrast is drawn graphically, and with a light and lively pen, between the state of things fifty years ago and that which ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... Markhams'; and some scientific, as 'Objects which are near display more detail than those which are further off.' Some, again, breathe a fine spirit of optimism, as 'Picturesqueness is the birthright of the bargee'; others are jubilant, as 'Paint firm and be jolly'; and many are purely autobiographical, such as No. 97, 'Few of us understand what it is that we mean by Art.' Nor is Mr. Quilter's manner less interesting than his matter. He tells us that at this festive season of the year, with Christmas and roast beef looming before us, 'Similes ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... ran exclusively on a topic which, sad to say, furnishes, in all grades of masculine society, the motif of nearly every joke worth telling. In this line, Jack was a discriminating anthologist, and, moreover, a judicious adapter—all his gestes being related in the first-person-singular. His autobiographical record was a staggerer; but I happened to recognise amongst his affaires de coeur several very old acquaintances, and made allowance accordingly. If he had been a truthful man, the floor of the hut would have opened that ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... from Ravenna in 1820, Byron, in answer to a request for contributions to a proposed memoir, introduces into his notes much autobiographical matter. In reference to a joint visit to Newstead, he writes: "Matthews and myself had travelled down from London together, talking all the way incessantly upon one single topic. When we got to Loughborough, I know not what chasm had made us diverge for a moment to some other subject, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... "How often", etc. This and the lines which immediately follow are autobiographical. Cf. George Primrose's story in 'The Vicar of Wakefield', 1766, ii. 24-5 (ch. i):—'I passed among the harmless peasants of Flanders, and among such of the French as were poor enough to be very merry; for I ever found them sprightly in proportion ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... egotistical, he flatly declined to give. "I will not venture on a psychological self-portraiture," he writes, "fearing—and I believe with sufficient reason—to be betrayed into affectation, dissimulation or some other alluring shape of lying. I believe that all autobiographical sketches are the result of mere vanity—not excepting those of St. Augustine and Rousseau—falsehood in the mask and mantle of truth. Half ashamed and half conscious of his own mendacious self-flattery, the historian of his own deeds or geographer of his own mind breaks ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... both "Vivian Gray" and "Contarini Fleming" are autobiographical. Like Byron, upon whom Disraeli fed, the author never got ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... that the weather had greatly improved, and with it Mrs. Clemens's health, notwithstanding she had an alarming attack in December. One of the stories he had finished was "The $30,000 Bequest." The work mentioned, which would not see print until after his death, was a continuation of those autobiographical chapters which for years he had been setting down as ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... added that the original is written in an autobiographical style. It is profusely interladed with spicy, catchy colloquials patent to the people of Tokyo for the equals of which we may look to the rattling speeches of notorious Chuck Conners of the Bowery ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... For autobiographical purposes always treat a deficiency as if it were a gift. The G.E. was apparently a duffer at arithmetic, but she tells you so in a way that makes you admire her for it. All the same I wish I had been one of those factory-girls ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... and weakness, as we can know only an amiable and communicative egotist; moreover, besides losing no opportunity for self-expression, both in and out of season, Heine published a good deal of frankly autobiographical matter, and wrote memoirs, only fragments of which have come down to us, but of which more than has yet appeared will perhaps ultimately be made accessible. Heine's life, then, is to us for the most ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... forth. And then came the chorus, which has this advantage over all other choruses ever written, that the most tuneless singer on earth (such as myself) and the most shamefaced (I am autobiographical again) can help to swell, at any rate, the notable opening of it, and thus ensure the ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... Royston Heath, on the 2nd {137} January, 1827. The event was the occasion of tremendous excitement, and the concourse of people was enormous. Of the popular aspect of the event on the morning of the fight, the following graphic reminiscence is taken from some autobiographical notes by the late Mr. John Warren, who, however, was too young to know anything further of ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... here take the liberty of neglecting a very great—as far as bulk goes, by far the greatest—part of Moore's own performance. He has inserted so many interesting autobiographical particulars in the prefaces to his complete works, that visits to the great mausoleum of the Russell memoirs are rarely necessary, and still more rarely profitable. His work for the booksellers was done at a time when the best class of such work was much better done than the best class of it is now; ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... book. It combines rewritten versions of two Jackson manuscripts, a study of the origins of printing in Europe and an autobiographical journal covering, we suppose, the years from about 1725 on. The writer, in his introduction, says that he had been attracted by the two notices mentioned and went to see Jackson, whom he already knew by reputation. As a "Lover of Art" he considered it his duty to acquaint the public ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... authorship was within my own circle detected. I saw several reviews of it, and I was amused to find that the critics perspicuously conjectured that because it was written in the first person it was probably autobiographical. I had several criticisms made on it by personal friends: some of them objected to the portraiture of persons in it being too life-like, selecting as instances two characters who were entirely imaginary; others objected to the portraiture as not being sufficiently life-like, and therefore ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and animated piece of description, which promises well for the development of its author. What looseness of construction exists may be charged to youth. "An Ambition and a Vision", by Nettie A. Hartman, is a neat and grammatically written little sketch, probably autobiographical, describing the evolution of an amateur. Greater cultivation of rhetorical taste would improve Miss Hartman's style, and we are certain that it possesses a fundamental merit which will make improvement an easy matter. With the usual regret we observe an instance of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... society yet known to the world. The author has sought his end by means of a fictitious autobiography. This was of course. No unusual faculty in the selection of methods was necessary to the choice; for only in the autobiographical form could the inner life of a courtesan be so revealed as to present a truthful and living picture of her soul's experience. A fine novel of this kind would be a great book, and one productive of much good; not, indeed, directly to the wretched class that would furnish ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth. His natural spirits gave him rapture with his cook-maid and cheerfulness in a garret." Here is a kit-kat showing the man indeed: all his fiction may be read in the light of it. The main interest in "Amelia" is found in its autobiographical flavor, for the story, in describing the fortunes—or rather misfortunes—of Captain Booth and his wife, drew, it is pretty certain, upon Fielding's own traits and to some extent upon the incidents of his earlier life. The scenes ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... complete this autobiographical sketch Mrs. Marsh started up in a fury, and brought her whip down on the table with a ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... Dream, which is understood to be partly autobiographical, he has minutely recorded the varying fortunes of pastoral life in the colonies. But the bitterness of failure never caused him to forget the happiness of his young enthusiasm, or to speak ill of a ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... up to a certain point an autobiographical cast. This is not because I deem my actual life of any interest to any one but myself, but because things do occur to one "in time," and the chronological sequence is as good as another, and much the ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... most radical views shall have become the commonplaces of pseudo-culture, the scientific psychologist will take the man in hand and, from the minute record of his life, emotions, thoughts, fancies, speculations and nightmares, which he has embodied in autobiographical novels and that most remarkable perhaps of all his creations, abysmal in its pessimism, "The Inferno," will be drawn a true ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... sonnets I have pursued what I believe to be an original line of investigation. The strictly autobiographical interpretation that critics have of late placed on these poems compelled me, as Shakespeare's biographer, to submit them to a very narrow scrutiny. My conclusion is adverse to the claim of the sonnets to rank as autobiographical documents, ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... SHERWOOD (chiefly Autobiographical), with Extracts from Mr. Sherwood's Journal during his Imprisonment in France and Residence in India. Edited by her Daughter, SOPHIA KELLY, Authoress of the "De Cliffords," "Robert ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... An autobiographical fragment, composed by Lord Shelburne in his closing years, and found among the Shelburne papers at Lansdowne House, presents with a vividness of detail and verisimilitude that leaves nothing to be desired the outlines of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... some of the short poems—is the one by this author which approaches nearest to being 'popular.' It is elevated in sentiment, classical in form,—in substance, biographical in relation to Keats, and in some minor degree autobiographical for Shelley himself. On these grounds it claimed a reasonable preference over all his other poems, for the present method of treatment; although some students of Shelley, myself included, might be disposed to maintain ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... and musical impeccability. I regard it as a work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection, and this commentary is but the humble testimony of my Veneration and gratitude for the genius to whom I owe the purest and most permanent joys of my life as a musician." In his "Autobiographical Sketch" Wagner confesses that as a lad he cared only for "Die Zauberflote," and that "Don Giovanni" was distasteful to him on account of the Italian text, which seemed to him rubbish. But in "Oper und Drama" he says: "Is it possible to find anything more perfect than every piece in 'Don Juan'? . ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... corresponds in Pope's reproduction. Horace is describing a genuine experience, while Pope is only putting together a string of commonplaces. The most interesting part of these imitations are those in which Pope takes advantage of the suggestions in Horace to be thoroughly autobiographical. He manages to run his own experience and feelings into the moulds provided for him by his predecessor. One of the happiest passages is that in which he turns the serious panegyric on Augustus into a ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen |
