Memoirs are all the rage nowadays. Seems everybody is writing one (which is both the good and bad features of self-publishing). But they’ve been around a long time, although for most of their existence they’ve been called autobiographies.

But they’re not identical. Broadly speaking, an autobiography gives the bare facts about a person’s life, whereas a memoir tells what those facts meant to the person — how events came to be, how they affected the writer, how they influenced his or her later decisions, and so on.

That understood, herewith a selective accounting of memoirs set in the Adirondacks over 400 years. We begin with Samuel de Champlain, who in 1609 immodestly named a big lake for himself, even though it already had a perfectly good name (several, in fact, whether in Mohawk, Algonquin or Abenaki). In so doing he set a pattern for denial of Indigenous presence for the next four centuries.

Then we come to Isaac Jogues, a French Catholic missionary who described his torture by Indigenous captors in the 1640s. Anyone who could gleefully reflect upon the joys of having wood splinters rammed under his fingernails must have been strong of faith indeed.

Memoirs did not burst forth in the 1700s, but Ethan Allan did write both dramatically and thoughtfully of his capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.”

Skip ahead to the rising popularity of vacations in the mountains in the mid-nineteenth century. Numerous writers capitalized on this fervor, chief among them William Henry Harrison “Adirondack” Murray, a minister of dubious repute who extolled the region’s glories so loosely that hundreds rushed in. He did not mention rain, blackflies or accommodations that were no more than drafty shacks with (maybe) an outhouse, but others, like Kate Field — a rare woman in a masculine field — did, launching the age of dueling memoirs.

Another woman memoirist was Jeanne Robert Foster, a pen name, who wrote poignantly of her experiences growing up “dirt poor” in the southeast Adirondacks, in a unique way: blank verse, in the late 1800s a controversial avant-garde poetic form.

Come the twentieth century, the genre expanded. T. Morris Longstreth (hiking), Martin V.B. Ives (canoeing) and others waxed on how getting out there was good not only for the body but also for the soul — not a new idea, but one that gained traction and attracted even more people to the woods.

Saranac Lake’s “beloved physician” Dr. E.L. Trudeau published, posthumously in 1916, his autobiography, cleverly titled “Autobiography.” But it’s really more of a memoir, following the definitions outlined above. Not only does he discuss finding treatments (not cures, folks) for tuberculosis; he also expresses what doing so meant to him, and to the world.

As that century progressed, more diversity was evident among Adirondack memoir writers. Martha Reben wrote about her contest with TB and the kindnesses of laconic Saranac Lakes guide Fred Rice. Anne LaBastille, in her “Woodswoman” set, expounded on life as a recluse in the Beaver River region, and about her passion for wilderness preservation. In contrast, Pat Thompson described how the coming of the snowmobile brought wintertime economic relief to the same region. And Alice Paden Green, only recently deceased, described in frank terms what it was like growing up Black in a gritty, prejudiced Adirondack mining town.

Adam Hochschilds’s “Half the Way Home” is a classic of the modern era. The only child of Harold Hochschild, stern and powerful industrialist and founder of the Adirondack Museum (now Experience), Adam was born when his father was in his 50s. He unpacks his difficult childhood in the Eagle Lake vicinity.

The best of the current supply, though, is “Finding True North,” by Middle Saranac Lake’s Fran Yardley. She successfully combines personal and institutional histories and impressions, no easy charge.

We lack space to present all of these titles. All but the oldest may be available online through an author search, in libraries or used book stores or, in the case of the most recent, in circulation. Several are excerpted in “The Adirondack Reader,” third edition, Adirondack Mountain Club, 2009.