Wolff's account of his Pacific Northwest adolescence under a violent stepfather is the third pillar — with Karr and Conroy — of the modern American childhood memoir. Spare, exact, written in a voice that refuses both self-pity and tidy redemption. The 1993 De Niro film softened it; the book does not.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.