My Life in Advertising

Claude Hopkins presents his autobiography as a business story rather than a personal history, leaving out trivia to keep to lessons he hoped would spare newcomers to advertising the groping he went through. He says he told the story one night in Los Angeles to Ben Hampton, a writer, publisher and advertising man, who listened for hours and made him promise to publish it. When it was announced as a serial, heads of big businesses he had worked for wrote in protest, worried he would claim too much credit, and Hopkins rewrote some chapters to remove any cause for that fear. It was published in 1927.

David Senra covered it in episode 430 of his Founders podcast, How to Write Ads That Sell.