American Lives: A Reader

Memoirs are as varied as human emotion and experience, and those published in the distinguished American Lives Series run the gamut. Excerpted from this series (called “splendid” by Newsweek) and collected here for the first time, these dispatches from American lives take us from China during the Cultural Revolution to the streets of New York in the sixties to a cabin in the backwoods of Idaho.

In prose as diverse as the stories they tell, writers such as Floyd Skloot, Ted Kooser, Peggy Shu...