Asimov, Isaac. In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979. Presents an exhaustively detailed account of his youth and early manhood. His avowed intention is to provide as many unvarnished facts of his life as possible, avoid interpretation of these facts and events as much as he can, and leave the glossing and parsing of them up to his readers.

Given Asimov's irrepressible wit, he does not quite succeed in presenting nothing but facts; his portrait of himself as a teenager includes his self-absorption, his love of whistling, and fondness for cemeteries—he presents himself as a comic figure whose bizarre habits cause his parents endless concern. He felt his eccentricities were his personal property, and he treated them as special parts of himself rather than as embarrassing traits. He noted, more than thirty years later, that...