The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
This is one of the 743 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.
About this list
NY Times, 50 Books
The New York Times’s book critics select the most outstanding memoirs published since 1969.
who voted:
Trade sources differ: a C-SPAN–based 2015 blog post tallied roughly 16 New York Times Book Review staffers, while a 2023 Publishers Weekly profile said the desk now has “more than 20 editors, critics and reporters” To keep our rankings conservative, we therefore credit each NYT list to 10 voters.
This list was originally published in 2019 and was added to this site almost 2 years ago.