Thanks to Sue William Silverman for this list! Please add your suggestions for book-length works on occupations in the comments below!
- Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Teacher
- Gesine Bullock-Prado, Confections of a Closet Master Baker
- Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop
- Kelly Cherry, Girl in a Library: On Women Writers and the Writing Life
- Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing-Sing
- Pat Conroy, The Water is Wide
- Robert Cowser, Dream Season: A Professor Joins America’s Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team
- Huston Diehl, Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School, 1970
- Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on An Imperfect Science; Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance
- Gail Griffin, Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue
- Brendan Halpin, Losing My Faculties: A Teacher’s Story
- Ben Hamper, Rivethead
- Jean Harper, Rose City: A Memoir of Work
- Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trades
- Frank McCourt, Teacher Man
- Ann McCutchan, The Muse that Sings: Composers Speak about the Creative Process
- Susan Neville, Iconography: A Writer’s Meditation
- Don Metz, Confessions of a Country Architect
- Danielle Ofri, Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue
- Louise Rafkin, Other People’s Dirt: A Housecleaner’s Curious Adventures
- Ruth Reichl, Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table
- Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
- Richard Seltzer, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery; Confessions of a Knife
- Frank Vertosick, Why We Hurt; The Natural History of Pain
Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies 