Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana is about a way of life long gone, but it is well worth reading. As for the more recent merchant marine, Christopher Buckley's Steaming to Bamboola is very funny, and I suppose fairly accurate. For forest rangers, Norman Maclean's novella "USFS 1919", collected in A River Runs Through It, gives a picture of how it was then. August Fruge, longtime director of the University of California Press, wrote an excellent memoir, A Skeptic Among Scholars. There are many academic novels and memoirs, but I think very well of Alvin Kernan's In Plato's Cave. Also there is Herbert Simon's Models of My Life, which touches on academia and computing.
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