Benjamin Graham — The Memoirs of the Dean of Wall Street

Graham wrote this late in life and it went unpublished for two decades after his death in 1976, appearing in 1996 from a manuscript edited by Seymour Chatman. It is not an investing book. It is the autobiography of an immigrant boy whose family went from comfort to poverty when his father died, who read Latin and Greek for pleasure, translated a Uruguayan novel, held patents, taught at Columbia for three decades, and happened also to invent security analysis as a discipline. The market appears — the 1929 crash nearly ruined him, and he says so plainly — but so do the marriages, the classics, and a frankness about his own conduct that his professional reputation had not prepared readers for.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s value-investing section leads with Graham’s two canonical texts and then includes this, which teaches nothing about valuation. Reading the memoir next to Security Analysis is the point: the discipline came out of a particular temperament and a particular experience of losing money, and the section is arranged so you meet the man as well as the method.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the 137-entry Himalaya Capital bibliography, in the section on Value Investing, Finance, and Capitalism — the one section Kyle’s two saved X posts did photograph, where it appears near The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis. The full list came from the source PDF.

Connections

• Benjamin Graham — the author and the subject; this is the first-person source on him.
• Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor — the two books this one stands behind, both also on Li Lu’s list.
• Margin of Safety — the idea, here traced back to the experience that produced it.
• Value Investing — the discipline, from the inside of the person who named it.
• Li Lu · Himalaya Capital — the curator and the bibliography.