Fictional Biographies & Memoirs
- Humorous Lives: Fictional Memoirs
- Fictional Lives Through History
- Dramatic Lives: Fictional Biographies
- Classics of Personal Journeys
This Side of Paradise
Amory Blaine grew up in a wealthy family and was given an Ivy League education. Without a need to learn a profession, he chiefly dabbled in …
Bindle
Herbert Jenkins' most popular fictional creation was Mr. Joseph Bindle, who first appeared in a humorous novel in 1916 and in a number of se…
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s semi-autobiographical first novel. It traces the early life of Stephen Dedalus and his in…
Great Expectations
Great Expectations is written in the first person and is virtually a fictional autobiography of “Pip” from his childhood, through often pain…
My Lady Ludlow
This novella by the acclaimed Elizabeth Gaskell follows the reminiscences and life of aristocratic Lady Ludlow, told through the eyes of one…
The Moon and Sixpence
This Maugham novel is based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. The story is told by the narrator as he gradually comes to know the mai…
The Diary of a Superfluous Man
Turgenev's shy hero, Tchulkaturin, is a representative example of a Russian archetype - the "superfluous man", a sort of Hamlet no…
The Mountebank
Andrew Lackaday, an English orphan, was born and brought up in a French circus. He becomes a highly skilled mimic and juggler. He plies his …
The King of Schnorrers
Manasseh da Costa, protagonist of this hilarious novel, is a schnorrer (beggar) who lives on the charitable contributions of the Jews of lat…
Not George Washington
It has been said that behind every successful man is a good woman. This is certainly true in the case of James Orlebar Cloyster. However, so…
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
Defoe wrote this novel after his work as a journalist and pamphleteer. By 1722, Defoe had become recognized as a novelist, with the success …
This Side of Paradise
This Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke po…
A Room of One’s Own
This feminist essay argues for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy. First…
Ophelia, the Rose of Elsinore
This story is from Mary Cowden Clarke's multi-volume work The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, in which she imagined the early lives of c…
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argued that women are not naturally inferior…
Rose Mather
Fiction merges with history in this novel taking place during the turbulent times of the civil war and the horrors it entailed. Holme's sill…
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Johnson's only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, was originally published anonymously in 1912. It is a fictional novel written …
Marguerite de Valois
A historical fiction novel set in Paris (1572) during Charles IX's reign and the French Wars of Religion. Marguerite de Valois, daughter of …
Kathleen
A group called the Scorpions, eight Oxford undergraduates, find a letter Kathleen wrote a letter to Joe at Oxford. They build up an image of…
Peggy Raymond's School Days
Published in 1916, this third installment with The Friendly Terrace girls places them in The Girl’s High School, with an array of new charac…