Fictional (Auto)biographies

by John Leonard Pielmeier
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5 books
Novels, often with a first-person narrator, tracing the life of a central character from birth through a significant discovery in his or her life.
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David Copperfield

Charles Dickens, 1992
Arguably Dickens’s finest, even though the title character is perhaps the least interesting thing about it. It hits all the marks for me—it’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s filled with vibrant people (good and bad) who are so real to me they could be individuals from my life.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain

Wallace Stegner, 2017
Stegner’s roman a clef. A portrait of a wonderful horrible marriage, of a wonderful terrible father, of a hopeful young man who may or may not survive the overwhelmingly sad circumstances conspiring against him.

The Sot-Weed Factor

John Barth, 2016
The story of Ebenezer Cooke, the virgin poet laureate of Maryland, and unforgettable Henry Burlingame III. Brilliant and funny, naughty and funny, imaginative and funny. Did I mention it was funny?

Crossing to Safety

Wallace Stegner, 2007
Stegner’s other masterpiece. This is the biography of two husbands and two wives and the friendship formed between the couples. It purports to be about the end of their lives together, but in order to get there, of course, Stegner must start at the beginning. Every time I read this book—even though I know what’s coming—I burst into tears at the end.

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann, 2023
Thomas Mann’s tale of Hans Castorp, a young man visiting a friend with tuberculosis at a mountain spa, who has no idea of what the mountain has in store for him. True, it doesn’t exactly cover all of Castorp’s life, but it is so emotionally encompassing that it certainly feels like a birth-to-death saga. (Warning: every time my wife or I have read this book, we’ve contracted a terrible cold.)