semi-autobiographical novels

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.”

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

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Partly Autobiographical Literature Is More Than Partly Interesting

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The semi-autobiographical novel 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, etc.

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. Meanwhile, readers learn stuff about an author’s life that they might not learn otherwise. (Of course, many memoirs also have some fictional elements, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Often, a semi-autobiographical work is an author’s first novel. After all, that kind of book can be easier to write because the author just has to remember aspects of her or his own life. And perhaps such a novel psychologically declutters an author’s brain so that s/he can more easily move on to writing novels with fewer or no autobiographical elements.

Examples of semi-autobiographical debut novels include James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain (teen has problems with religion and harsh stepfather), Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (growing up lesbian), Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (Chinese-American immigrant experience), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (college years), and Herman Melville’s Typee (tropical island adventure).

(Melville went on to pen several other partly autobiographical novels — Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket — before writing that little thing you may have heard of called Moby-Dick.)

In other cases, authors don’t go the selfie route until later in their literary careers, as did Charlotte Bronte with Villette (English loner teaches in France) and W. Somerset Maugham with Of Human Bondage (personal and professional struggles of a would-be doctor). Authors might want to wait until their writing is developed enough to best convey their own experiences, or wait to become famous/established enough to risk writing something more personal, or wait for enough years to go by to have more perspective on what they’re writing about, etc.

Nathaniel Hawthorne let a decade pass before penning The Blithedale Romance, a fictionalized version of his experiences living on a communal farm. But Charles Bukowski waited only two years to write Hollywood — a minimally disguised account of doing the screenplay for, and seeing the making of, the movie Barfly starring Mickey Rourke in a Bukowski-ish role. (I read the very funny Hollywood this month.)

Occasionally, disguising is a necessity. It’s obvious to readers that Fyodor Dostoevsky was part-fictionally recounting his own Siberian internment experiences in Notes From a Dead House, but to get the novel approved by Russian government censors he couched it as the recollections of a murderer rather than those of a political prisoner like Dostoevsky had been. (I’m in the middle of reading the fascinating Dead House now.)

Other semi-autobiographical works written in early, mid, or late career? George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (Maggie and Tom’s troubled sibling relationship was partly based on the dynamics between Eliot and her brother), Willa Cather’s My Antonia (Cather channeled male character Jim Burden), Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (the author reversed his CD initials to DC), Jack London’s Martin Eden (the ME initials signify the London “me”), Colette’s The Vagabond (partly based on the author’s time performing in music halls), L.M. Montgomery’s Emily trilogy (the struggle to become a successful writer), and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (set in the hometown of the author’s youth and featuring a relationship inspired by a real-life relationship Hurston had).

Also: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Tom is an amalgam of the young Twain and two of his schoolmates), John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (which includes characters based on the author’s ancestors and features a brief cameo by a young John himself), Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (World War I trauma), Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree (living down-and-out in Tennessee), Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (small-town Illinois childhood), E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair (growing up in the Bronx during the 1930s), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (depression), and Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (schizophrenia).

What are your favorite semi-autobiographical novels?

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I’m writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.