Benjamin Graham — The Memoirs of the Dean of Wall Street

Why it’s on the list: The autobiography of the man who invented security analysis — an immigrant boy who read Latin and Greek for pleasure, nearly lost everything in 1929, and taught at Columbia for three decades. It teaches nothing about valuation; it shows the temperament the discipline came out of.

Where I heard about it

• Li Lu — on Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the Himalaya Capital bibliography, in the section on Value Investing, Finance, and Capitalism, near The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis.

About this edition

Graham wrote this late in life and it went unpublished for two decades after his death in 1976, appearing in 1996 from a manuscript edited by Seymour Chatman.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 covers his family’s fall from comfort to poverty when his father died, his translation of a Uruguayan novel, his patents, his marriages, and a frankness about his own conduct that his professional reputation had not prepared readers for. Li Lu’s section leads with Graham’s two canonical texts and then includes this, so you meet the man as well as the method.

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.