Latin memoria 'memory, remembrance') is any nonfiction narrative writing based mostly on the creator's personal reminiscences. The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be factual. Whereas memoir has historically been outlined as a subcategory of biography or autobiography because the late twentieth century, the style is differentiated in kind, presenting a narrowed focus, normally a specific time part in someone's life or profession. A biography or autobiography tells the story "of a life", while a memoir usually tells the story of a specific profession, event, or time, akin to touchstone moments and turning factors in the creator's life. The creator of a memoir may be referred to as a memoirist or a memorialist. Memoirs have been written because the ancient occasions, as shown by Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, often known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Within the work, Caesar describes the battles that passed off throughout the 9 years that he spent preventing local armies within the Gallic Wars.

His second memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Civil War) is an account of the occasions that occurred between forty nine and 48 BC in the civil warfare against Gnaeus Pompeius and the Senate. The famous Libanius, trainer of rhetoric who lived between an estimated 314 and 394 Advert, framed his life memoir as certainly one of his literary orations, which have been written to be learn aloud within the privacy of his study. This kind of memoir refers to the idea in historic Greece and Rome, that memoirs had been like "memos", or items of unfinished and unpublished writing, which a writer would possibly use as a Memory Wave Method assist to make a more finished document later on. The Sarashina Nikki is an instance of an early Japanese memoir, written within the Heian period. A genre of e book writing, Nikki Bungaku, emerged during this time. Themes of courtroom life, introspection, and emotional expressiveness have been ceaselessly explored in Japanese memoirs; Sarashina Nikki is among probably the most properly-identified examples.

Within the Center Ages, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Jean de Joinville, and Philippe de Commines wrote memoirs, while the genre was represented towards the end of the Renaissance, via the works of Blaise de Montluc and Margaret of Valois, that she was the primary lady to put in writing her Memoirs in modern-model. One of the first recognized examples of medieval memoir writing is Villehardouin's De la Conquête de Constantinople, which supplies a primary-hand narrative of the Fourth Crusade. Till the Age of Enlightenment encompassing the seventeenth and 18th centuries, works of memoir had been written by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury; François de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac of France; and Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, who wrote Memoirs at his household's dwelling at the castle of La Ferté-Vidame. Whereas Saint-Simon was considered a author possessing a excessive level of skill for narrative and character development, it was not until well after his demise that his work as a memoirist was recognized, leading to literary fame.

Over the latter half of the 18th by means of the mid-20th century, memoirists typically included those who had been noted within their chosen profession. These authors wrote as a strategy to document and publish their very own account of their public exploits. Authors included politicians or people in court docket society and have been later joined by army leaders and businessmen. An exception to those fashions is Henry David Thoreau's 1854 memoir Walden, which presents his experiences over the course of two years in a cabin he constructed close to Walden Pond. Thoreau's memoir, which emphasized the individual's interplay with nature and independence, turned a key work of American literature, especially inside the transcendentalist motion. Twentieth-century conflict memoirs became a style of their very own, including, from the first World Struggle, Ernst Jünger (Storm of Steel) and Frederic Manning's Her Privates We. Memoirs documenting incarceration by Nazi Germany in the course of the struggle embrace Primo Levi's If It is a Man, which covers his arrest as a member of the Italian Resistance Motion, adopted by his life as a prisoner in Auschwitz; and Elie Wiesel's Night, which relies on his life previous to and during his time within the Auschwitz, Buna Werke, and Buchenwald concentration camps.