Best New Yorker Personal History
Personal History publishes autobiographical essays and memoirs. These intimate first-person narratives explore life experiences, family histories, and defining moments.
31 picks · 1986–2023
Top authors: John McPhee (4), Mary McCarthy (1), Muriel Spark (1)
Personal History by John McPhee: A project meant not to end.
Personal History by John McPhee: A project meant not to end.
The area between Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen resembles the nineteen-seventies city that’s been romanticized in the movies, Rivka Galchen writes. But do we really want to live in “Taxi Driver”?
Jiayang Fan reflects on the separation from her mother, who suffers from A.L.S., during the pandemic, and on the online sensation her story became for Chinese nationalists.
Personal History by John McPhee: A project meant not to end.
Personal History by Zuzana Justman: What is most striking to me today about the diary I kept in the camp, seventy-five years ago, is what I left out.
Robert A. Caro writes about life on a Presidential paper trail.
Peter Hessler on raising a family during a revolution.
My cousin became a convicted felon in his teens. I tried to make sure he got a second chance. What went wrong?
Burkhard Bilger attends a session with Gabriele Baring where Germans address their family histories and inherited trauma from the Second World War.
The complicated life of Svetlana Alliluyeva.
Ariel Levy writes about her pregnancy, her journey to Mongolia, and a personal tragedy.
Two muses, one loaf.
After a daughter dies, a new life with her children.
Orhan Pamuk on growing up among the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
George Saunders on the Christmas when he was twenty-six, living in his home town, working in roofing and witnessed a man being cheated out of Christmas.
Gabriel García Márquez on his early struggles and eventual—and troubling—success.
Cynthia Zarin remember her daughter’s terrifying illness.
Laura Hillenbrand on the mysterious sickness that seized control of her life and wouldn’t let go.
Oliver Sacks’s 1999 memoir of his early years. “Many of my childhood memories are of metals: these seemed to exert a power on me from the start.”
From 1998: Cynthia Ozick on life after graduate school, lunch breaks in Bryant Park, and avoiding a future in accounting.
Andrew Solomon on his struggle with depression.
The author of “A Sport and a Pastime” on his years as a screenwriter.
Suzannah Lessard’s 1996 profile of her great-grandfather Stanford White, the architect who designed Madison Square Garden and the Washington Square Arch and who was murdered in 1906.
Frank McCourt on why his parents left Ireland—and returned—in a selection from the 1996 memoir, which won a Pulitzer Prize.
What was a Ziegfeld girl about? Taking a hard life and turning it into a world of fun and glamour, John Lahr wrote about his mother, a former Broadway chorus dancer, in 1996.
The author examines his family and its losses, six years after his son was convicted of murder.
How it felt to be a young baseball fan in nineteen-thirties New York, with heroes like Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Babe Ruth.
Muriel Spark on how she discovered Miss Jean Brodie.
Mary McCarthy’s 1986 piece about her years attending public high schools and convent schools.