Read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Marjane Satrapi grows up through the Iranian revolution, in black and white.

A first love and a fundamentalist childhood in a Wisconsin winter; Craig Thompson's 600 pages.

Two years in a cabin by a pond; Thoreau on living deliberately.

Zweig's memoir of Vienna before 1914 and Europe after, finished the day before his suicide.

Orwell fights in the Spanish Civil War, is shot through the throat and sees the revolution betrayed.

Orwell as a dishwasher and a tramp; poverty from the inside.

Anne Frank in the Amsterdam annex from 1942 to 1944.

Elie Wiesel at fifteen in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; a hundred pages that changed how the Holocaust is written.