Confessions

Confessions is an autobiographical work by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, covering the first fifty-three years of his life. Rousseau wrote the first six books between 1765 and 1767 and the remaining six between 1769 and 1770, completing the manuscript in 1769, but the work was not published until 1782, four years after his death, with a second part following in 1789; it is often printed under the fuller title The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau specifically to distinguish it from Saint Augustine's earlier work of the same name. Rousseau read excerpts publicly at salons during his own lifetime before the book's eventual print publication in Switzerland, and it is widely regarded as one of the first major Western autobiographies to center on personal feeling and worldly experience rather than primarily religious confession, establishing a model of frank, self-examining autobiography that many later writers followed.