The Best Autobiographies of our Time

WITHIN THE PAST HALF CENTURY OR SO certain autobiographies have stood out from one's reading and reviewing, not always for their literary quality. Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth was a 1933 landmark because, sensitively, earnestly written, it achieved its author's aim: to show what the 1914 war and postwar period had meant to men and women of her generation, the changes wrought in the minds of a large section of the middle class, her own as daughter of a Staffordshire paper‐mill owner.