Memoirs

A dramatic, very articulate, very compassionate and very precious “virtual memoir”, recounting in vivid detail the unfolding and the climax of the Great Plague of 1665 that devastated London – the world’s biggest city at the time – by the author of the immortal Robinson Crusoe [1].
A thoroughly researched and well-documented account written from the point of view and under the signature of Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, who had lived through that cataclysmic event – Daniel was 5 years old at the (…)

A moving and insightful series of recollections of life and conversations with the great story-teller and playwright by three writers and friends who knew him well, first published in New York in 1921.
Translated by Samuel Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf.
(19,200 words) CONTENTS
1. ANTON CHEKHOV, FRAGMENTS OF RECOLLECTIONS by Maxim Gorky First published in Russia in 1906.
2. TO CHEKHOV’S MEMORY by Aleksandr Kuprin First published in this English translation in 1921.
3. A. P. CHEKHOV (…)

The spectacular memoir [1] of a Spanish soldier in the heyday of Spanish might in the early 17th century, describing his adventurous and excessively violent career as a soldier, sailor and officer of the Order of Malta from the time he left home in 1595 at the age of 13 – with the first of a great many killings already behind him – until the memoir comes to an end almost 30 years later.
This fascinating memoir, that historical research has shown to be scrupulously exact in all its military (…)

The author recounts how he had quite absented himself from the (mindless, to him) hustle and bustle of life in the thriving New England village of Concord to build a small log cabin deep in the woods nearby the pond (or rather small lake) of the title.
He describes in loving and indeed fascinating detail all the vegetable, animal, mineral, insect, and bird life that he saw around him and his quite extraordinary abode, in which he spent two full years including two particularly icy and (…)

Presented as a novel, this is a not-at-all-disguised memoir of the four years that the author spent in a Siberian penal prison as a political prisoner.
A remarkably credible and vivid account centered on the personalities of his fellow prisoners and of the prison guards while calmly and clearly recounting the terrible punishments handed out to the common prisoners (the intellectuals and nobles like the author were exempted from corporal punishment) as well as the everyday conditions in the (…)

Robert Louis Stevenson’s charming account of a twelve-day hike he made on foot in 1878, accompanied by his stubborn and self-willed donkey Modestine, across the wild country of the Cévennes in south-central France, stopping for four days at a secluded Trappist monastery where the monks were sworn to silence – except to talk with visitors when they were very voluble indeed – and continuing, almost always sleeping in the wild, through the mountainous area of the Cévennes that had been a (…)

George Orwell, a convinced left-wing socialist, went to Barcelona in December 1936 to join the forces in Catalonia fighting against the military uprising led by the General Franco. He joined the extreme-left party P.O.U.M. there and spent six months on duty in their section of the front line before being seriously wounded.
He was present in Barcelona when there was severe internecine fighting between the Communist-led government forces and Anarchist and P.O.U.M. militiamen that ended with (…)

George Orwell (1903-1950) was a passionate defender all his life of the underdogs in the society of his time, and in spite of his background as a member of the upper middle class — he was well educated and spoke with a “posh” accent — spent several years in his late twenties working as a dishwasher in Paris restaurants and hotels and also just tramping about England for months on end without a penny in his pocket, observing and experiencing for himself the ways and the language and the (…)

This account of his four-months stay among the fiercest tribe in the remote Marquesan Island of Nukuheva was Herman Melville’s first book, and its enormous success – it was the best-selling of all his books during his lifetime – was essential in deciding the future author of the monumental “Moby Dick” to become a full-time writer.
A young sailor at the time on a whale-boat that had stopped off there to replenish its supplies, just a few weeks after the French has sent a full squadron of (…)

After the phenomenal success of his monumental political memoir Out of the Night in 1941 [1], Richard Krebs (nom-de-plume: Jan Valtin) was arrested and tried for an attempted (political) murder he was accused of having committed in the twenties – for which he was acquitted – in 1942, and then in 1943 he was drafted into the US Army, which sent this expert on German affairs, after training, to the Pacific front.
Where he served as a combat reporter with the crack 24th Infantry Division, (…)