My First Thirty Years: A Memoir

Shortly after its 1925 publication, Gertrude Beasley's ferociously eloquent feminist memoir was banned and she herself disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Though British Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell calledMy First Thirty Years"truthful, which is illegal" and Larry McMurtry pronounced it the finest Texas book of its era, Beasley's words have been all but inaccessible for almost a century-until now.

Beasley penned one of the most brutally honest coming-of-age historical memoirs,...