Autobiographies

He sat down at sixty-seven to write about himself for his children, never meaning it to be published, and the first thing he sets down is that he was a slow, ordinary boy whose father once warned him he would be a disgrace to the family. What follows is the strangest kind of triumph: the man who had rewritten the story of every living thing keeps insisting he possessed no great quickness of apprehension, only patience and a love of facts.