What Autobiography & Confession argues

To write one's own life is among the oldest and most radical uses of literacy: from Augustine's prayerful self-accusation to the slave narratives of Douglass and Jacobs, the first-person account turns a private existence into a public document and a witness.
Autobiography is where philosophy, religion, and history converge in a single voice — the examined life of the moralist, the confession of the penitent, and the primary source of the historian are all the same act of remembering oneself onto the page.

Primary works in Autobiography & Confession (13)

Philosophy — The examined life, written down: from Augustine's interrogation of memory and will to Rousseau's confessional self-analysis, autobiography is moral philosophy conducted in the first person — the self made its own object of study.
Religion & Spirituality — Confession is the genre's root: Augustine addresses his Confessions to God, and the spiritual autobiography — sin, conversion, grace — is the template every secular memoir after it inherits and inverts.
History — A life-record is a primary source: the slave narratives of Douglass and Jacobs and Gibbon's memoir of writing his history are read at once as personal testimony and as the raw material of history.