Burlington Public Library

The national bestselling biography and the basis for the film Capote starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in an Academy Award–winning turn. One of the strongest fiction writers of his generation, Truman Capote became a literary star while still in his teens. His most phenomenal successes include Breakfast at Tiffany's, In Cold Blood, and Other Voices, Other Rooms. Even while his literary achievements were setting the standards that other fiction and...

Roads of Destiny (1909) is a collection of short stories by American writer O. Henry. Inspired by his experiences as a fugitive and in prison, these stories address themes of crime, poverty, and fate. "A Retrieved Reformation," perhaps the most notable of the collection's twenty-two stories, is semi-autobiographical in that it explores the life of a criminal and fugitive who maintains a moral identity while struggling to adjust to life outside of...

The celebrated author of mystery stories set in the American Southwest offers a memoir that touches on family, war, the Depression, and the life of a writer.

The popular television cooking show host traces his rise from an intimidated thirteen-year-old apprentice to a famous chef, recounting his work under prestigious teachers, his journey to America, and his experiences with contemporaries.

Originally published in 1928, this is the story of Orlando, a passionate young nobleman of Queen Elizabeth I's court. By the close of his story he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed.

Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James....

A searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, and loss from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award winner. When his mother passed away at the age of 78, Sherman Alexie responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is this stunning memoir. Featuring 78 poems, 78 essays and intimate family photographs, Alexie shares raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine--growing up dirt-poor on...

This memoir describes the author's experience of her book tour for Chosen by a horse. At her second reading she met the man from whom she'd bought her house twenty-four years earlier, and they fell in love.

"The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written in 1933 by Gertrude Stein in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was her lover. It is a fascinating insight into the art scene in Paris as the couple were friends with Paul Câezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They begin the war years in England but return to France, volunteering for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving around France, helping the wounded...

"Before Night Fall is Reinaldo Arenas's stunning autobiography - a bold and unrestrained account of his life as a writer and a homosexual. Arenas, acknowledged as one of the great twentieth-century Cuban writers, was born in 1943 into a poor, rural Cuban family. At the age of fifteen he joined Castro's guerrillas against Batista's right-wing regime, only to discover that repression under Castro would be on a monumental scale. Reinaldo Arenas spent...