jack-kerouac

A Semi-Comprehensive Look at Semi-Autobiographical Novels

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In early 2016, I wrote about semi-autobiographical novels. Now that nearly 10 years have passed, I suppose it would be semi-okay to write about those books again — mentioning semi-autobiographical novels I’ve read since then or had read before then but didn’t mention in that previous post. So, with this semi-decent first paragraph nearly done, here goes:

As I wrote in ’16, semi-autobiographical novels “can be the best of both worlds for authors and their readers. That mix of memoir and fiction takes facts and embellishes them and/or dramatizes them and/or smooths them into more coherent form. A partly autobiographical approach also allows authors to potentially pen very heartfelt books — after all, they lived the emotions — and perhaps provides those writers with some mental therapy, too.” I also wrote that a semi-autobiographical novel is often, but of course not always, a debut novel — at least partly because that kind of book might be easier to write; the author can use aspects of her or his own past.

Back here in late 2025, I just read The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje, whose 2011 coming-of-age novel was inspired to an extent by the author’s life and a ship voyage he took as a boy from his native Sri Lanka to rejoin his mother in England after his parents had separated several years earlier. A boy named…hmm…Michael. The Cat’s Table is another compelling book by The English Patient author, who went on to live in Canada.

Another semi-autobiographical/coming-of-age novel (those two things often go together) is Betty Smith’s 1943 bestseller A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — about a brainy girl (Francie) growing up in an impoverished urban family.

Then there’s Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, who loosely based her classic 1868-69 novel on herself and her three sisters.

A few decades earlier, Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic 1826 novel The Last Man featured three principal characters based on herself, her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their friend and fellow writer Lord Byron.

Aldous Huxley also used famous people as models for characters in his 1928 novel Point Counter Point — including himself, Nancy Cunard, D.H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield.

The characters in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) are somewhat modeled on the author’s father (attorney Atticus Finch in the novel), herself (Scout in the book) and Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote (fictionally named Dill).

Kurt Vonnegut’s horrific World War II experiences were fuel for his sci-fi-infused 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, and Jack Kerouac’s travel experiences provided fodder for his On the Road (1957).

Some of the semi-autobiographical novels mentioned in my 2016 post include James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Charles Bukowski’s Hollywood, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Colette’s The Vagabond, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jack London’s Martin Eden, W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Herman Melville’s Typee, L.M. Montgomery’s Emily trilogy, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “When Christmas-tree lights reflect off the window, it’s a pane in the grass.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which contains a tale of two meetings — is here.

Cars Can Help Drive the Plots of Novels

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Our 2014 Toyota Prius leaving its apartment-complex garage. (Driven by my wife Laurel/photographed by me.)

My wife Laurel and I drove from New Jersey to Michigan and back this weekend for a memorial service in Ann Arbor for a cherished family member. It was a crazily compressed November 14-16 car journey of more than 1,200 miles round trip — a travel method we chose to avoid possible flight problems in the aftermath of the U.S. government shutdown.

Anyway, all that automotive time means I have driving on my mind, so I’m resurrecting a piece about cars in literature that I wrote for The Huffington Post in 2013, a year before starting this WordPress blog. Here it is, slightly edited and slightly rewritten:

In literature, sometimes a car is just a car. But sometimes it’s a “vehicle” for authors to write about independence, loneliness, progress, sex, death, wealth, poverty, and more.

Whether or not book-based cars are weighted with symbolism, most readers relate to driving. So I’d like to steer you to some novels in which cars are important “characters,” and then hear about your favorite fictional works that feature those on-the-road contraptions.

Which reminds me of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road novel and the way some cars in literature are used to search (futilely or otherwise) for freedom and/or pleasure, and can speak to characters’ restlessness, aimlessness, and/or discontent.

That’s the case in Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance. Protagonist Jim Nashe spends the first part of the novel endlessly crisscrossing the U.S. in a car after his wife leaves him. The ex-firefighter, who finances his marathon road trip with an unexpected inheritance, eventually ends up involved in a high-stakes poker game at the mansion of two eccentric/heartless rich guys. Then things get really weird before the novel concludes with (wait for it!) one more car ride.

There’s another fateful auto scene — though not at the end of the book — in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. It’s a car chase that features Calliope’s dad Milton driving too fast on the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Canada.

Motor vehicles also figure prominently in Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, with successful automaker Eugene Morgan representing turn-of-the-20th-century progress while Major Amberson and his dwindling fortune represent the vanishing horse-and-buggy age. New money vs. old money and all that.

Tarkington contemporary L.M. Montgomery offers a scene in The Blue Castle of Valancy Stirling sharing an exuberant car ride with “misfit” Barney Snaith. Many people in their straitlaced town are suspicious of Barney, but Valancy finds him very interesting — so the car ride is a symbol of Valancy’s break from the conventions of her place, time, and family.

Novels of the Montgomery-Tarkington era were usually subtle about sex, but that’s not the case with many books of recent decades. For instance, there’s a scene in Ken Grimwood’s time-travel novel Replay that shows how cars can potentially be bedrooms on wheels.

Speaking of time travel, there’s a great section of Jack Finney’s Time and Again in which Simon accompanies Julia from her present (1880s) to his present (around 1970), and Julia is of course stunned by the experience of riding in a modern motor vehicle.

Readers are the ones who might be stunned as they peruse Charles Dickinson’s The Widows’ Adventures, a novel starring two women on a long road trip. The one doing the driving is…blind!

Then there are supernatural thrills in car-oriented Stephen King novels such as Christine and From a Buick 8. The latter book includes a spooky gas station scene before various law-enforcement people enter the story.

Two memorable moments in Cormac McCathy’s Suttree involve what the title character does to a police car (to avenge racist cop behavior) and what Suttree’s girlfriend does to the couple’s own car. And in Fay Weldon’s The Bulgari Connection, the spurned older wife is jailed after using an auto to do a certain something to the trophy wife who “replaced” her.

Or how about that tense yet hilarious Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets scene in which J.K. Rowling has Harry and Ron travel to Hogwarts in a flying car? An auto can definitely be a “vehicle” for humor.

On a much more serious note, a car converted into a truck of sorts is how the Joad family travels from drought-stricken/agribusiness-devastated Oklahoma to a hoped-for better life in California. But the reality out west for the non-rich is as dismal as the Joads’ aged jalopy in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

People take long car trips for various reasons. In John Grisham’s The Client, attorney Reggie Love and her beleaguered 11-year-old client Mark drive from Memphis to New Orleans to try to locate the body of a murdered U.S. senator.

What are your favorite fictional works with motor vehicle motifs?

Misty the cat says: “The Lincoln Tunnel has been renovated!”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about two flawed local ballot questions relating to a massive school budget deficit — is here.