From his decision to leave school at fifteen to roam the world, to his recollections of life as a hobo on the Southern Pacific Railroad, as a cattle skinner in Texas, as a merchant seaman in Singapore and the West Indies, and as an itinerant bare-knuckled prizefighter across small-town America, here is Louis L'Amour's memoir of his lifelong love affair with learning--from books, from yondering, and from some remarkable men and women--that shaped him...

The celebrated author of mystery stories set in the American Southwest offers a memoir that touches on family, war, the Depression, and the life of a writer.

"A biography of one of America's most popular and misunderstood authors, John Steinbeck. This first full-length biography of the Nobel Laureate to appear in a quarter century explores John Steinbeck's long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatness with masterpieces such as The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath. His most poignant and evocative writing emerged in his...

This is an account of the novelist's emotions after the stillbirth of her first child.

Internationally bestselling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins delivers the long awaited tale of his wild life and times, both at home and around the globe.

"From New York Times bestselling author Amy Tan, a memoir on her life as a writer, her childhood, and the symbiotic relationship between fiction and emotional memory"--

From the Publisher: Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes 'unstuck in time' after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five...

Shares the author's assessment of how a seductive cowboy challenged her feminist beliefs, describing how as an embittered, middle-aged divorcée she began to question her staunch beliefs before being swept off her feet by a very masculine lover.

After Burroughs was adopted by his mother's shrink at age 13, his childhood took a turn for the bizarre with electroshock machine fun and games; month-long family/patient sleep-overs on the front lawn; a physician-assisted fake suicide attempt to get excused from school forever; and a pedophile living in the barn. Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her...

In this caustically funny, nostalgic, poignant, and moving collection Augusten Burroughs recounts Christmases past and present--as only he could. With gimleteyed wit and illuminated prose, he shows how the holidays bring out the worst in us and sometimes, just sometimes, the very, very best.