My Life in Writing: Memoirs of a Maverick

by J.C. Furnas

Foreword
Such Interesting People
Learning by Doing
World I Never Made
Backwater
War the First
Learning in Limbo
Alma Stepmater
Makeshifts
Regards to Broadway
Ways & Means
Breaking In
War the Second
Footnote on Writers
Horse & Buggy Modern
And I Hope to Travel More
Down to the Sea in Ships
The Privilege of Hearing
A Profession?
Index

396 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1989

About the author

Full name: Joseph Chamberlain Furnas.

Reviews

[Felisa Rosa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I absolutely love J.C. Furnas, who wrote an amazing cultural history of the Americas (The Americans: A Social History of the United States, 1587-1914), which is one of my favorite books of all time. I was really excited to get my hands on his memoir, because he is an adept writer with a searing sensibility and an amazing grasp of history.

However, this is hands down the most confounding autobiography I've ever read. For example, Furnas never describes his wife or how he met her, but gives detailed descriptions of the organizational system in an office he worked at as a young man (some 50 years before he was writing the book). Completely devoid of emotional content, in other words. He's still very funny and the book contains amusing curmudgeonly rants and excellent descriptions of travel by freighter in the early twentieth century. But it's completely disorganized and random and basically has no narrative structure, which is the sort of thing Furnas would be likely to deride in other authors.