My Wicked, Wicked Ways – Errol Flynn, 1959 ★

Confessions of a Debauched Swashbuckler

When it comes to getting a manuscript published, most times an author’s sudden death won’t help it to the finish line. In the case of My Wicked, Wicked Ways, I think Errol Flynn dying helped get it out. Hard to imagine him ever wanting this version of himself exposed in public.

Maybe it was the spirit of the 1960s. True, the decade was still days away when My Wicked, Wicked Ways was released, two months after Flynn’s October 1959 death. The author’s desire to shock and offend readers with his wild life feels more in tune with the coming decade.

Whatever era you are in, it’s hard to like this guy. In his own telling, Flynn was a rank bastard. What starts out as candid recollections over drinks soon feels more like an exclusive audience with a sociopath.

As he so charmingly puts it late in the book: “Ts-t! Ts-t! It takes some ladies so long to realise they have been raped.”

Winchell Exclusive – Walter Winchell, 1975 ★½

The Airing of Grievances

Once he ruled the world, or a significant portion of it he helped to create. Near the end, he had fallen so far that even those who followed his path remembered him but faintly, and with a shrug.

Another person might take stock. Walter Winchell took umbrage. In this posthumous memoir, the proudly pugnacious pundit has some bones to pick, and spends a lot more time venting than explaining:

Before I go to hell – which can’t be too far off – I want them all to know that I’ve wearied of the mutual deception. I have forgiven, but I don’t have to forget. I’m not a fighter, I’m a “waiter.” I wait until I catch an ingrate with his fly open, and then I take a picture of it.

Autobiography Of Benvenuto Cellini – Translated by John Addington Symonds, 1558-63 ★★

Portrait of an Artist as a Raging Bull

Autobiography Of Benvenuto Cellini is a book drenched in war, sex, intrigue, and murder. Its writer was one of the leading artists of his time, a figure steeped in controversy and mystery. He also had a fierce temper and an appetite for killing when his blood was up, which it often was.

Given all that, why do I find his book a chore to read?

The Autobiography Of Mark Twain – Mark Twain [Edited by Charles Neider, 1959] ★★½

Twain In Twilight: Disorganized, Dis-spiriting, Still Quotable

Mark Twain produced one of the most celebrated autobiographies in American literature. This was not his own, but rather that of Ulysses S. Grant, which Twain painstakingly midwifed to great commercial success and lasting popular acclaim. It still ranks high among presidential memoirs.

Twain also wrote an autobiography of his own, a very notable work even if it is hard to similarly declare a success. Four radically different versions of The Autobiography Of Mark Twain exist in print, without a clear consensus as to which, if any, should be considered definitive. 

But of the four currently extant, including a three-volume set completed this year, the autobiography edited by Charles Neider and published in 1959 may well be the most digestible.