Confessional writing is a literary style and genre that developed in American writing schools following the Second World War. A prominent mode of confessional writing is confessional poetry, which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Confessional writing is often historically associated with Postmodernism due to the features which the modes share: including self-performativity and self-reflexivity; discussions of culturally taboo subjects; and the literary influences of personal conflict and historical trauma. Confessional writing also has historical origins in Catholic confessional practices. As such, confessional writing is congruent with psychoanalytic literary criticism. Confessional writing is also a form of life writing, especially through the autobiography form.

Confessional writing usually involves the disclosure of personal revelations and secrets, often in first-person, non-fiction forms such as diaries and memoirs. Confessional writing often employs colloquial speech and direct language to invoke an immediacy between reader and author. Confessional writers also use this direct language to radically reduce the distance between the speaker-persona of a text and the writer's personal voice. Confessional writing can also be fictive, such as in the hybrid form of the roman à clef.

Though originating in American literary circles, by writers and poets such as Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, the style has gained global use concurrently with the growth of Postcolonial theory at the end of the 20th century, especially throughout Eurasia and the Middle East. Confessional writing has also influenced other mediums, including the visual arts and reality television.

A highly influential movement, confessional writing has been critiqued as narcissistic, self-indulgent, as well as a violation of the privacy of the private individuals which confessional writers depict.

The confessional writing genre has historical roots in Catholic confessional practices. Works such as St. Augustine's Confessions and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions are historic antecedents to the modern confessional genre in their depictions of secret emotions, personal revelations, and of sin.

In the early 20th century, the growth of psychoanalysis increased academic interest in the psychological functions of confession itself. Following their expatriation from wartime continental Europe to the United Kingdom and United States during the Second World War, eminent psychoanalytical theorists including Sigmund Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Rudolph Loewenstein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein began to theorise on the defence functions of ego in times of conflict. Wittgenstein expounded on confession as a 'means of self-development,' in that the catharsis facilitated by the act of confession allowed for closure, and the progression away from both unconscious and conscious suffering: writing in 1931 that 'a confession must be part of your new life.'

The literary 'confessional' term was first attributed to a form of writing in 1959: by critic M.L. Rosenthal in response to the confessional poet Robert Lowell's seminal anthology Life Studies. The anthology is widely regarded as a seminal confessional text, in the poet's revelations on his relationship to his parents, marital conflict, depression, and generational trauma. Many confessional writers at the time were associated with or worked in American writing schools at institutions such as Boston University. Though the style has since gained global use (See: Global influence), confessional writing emerged in America during the turbulent late 1950s and early 1960s, and was initially characterised by movements away from strictly metred verse to free verse. Following the Second World War, the Holocaust, and during other collective traumas such as the Cold War, American 'cultural alienation' induced writers to externalise their internal, psychological anxieties and angsts through their literary outputs.

The period was also marked by the secession of Modernism to Postmodernism, the Civil rights movement, the Gay Rights Movement, and the onset of Second Wave Feminism and Postcolonialism. As such, early confessional works, by writers such as Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Dan Guenther, and Robert Lowell encompass personal and social issues including distrust of metanarratives, solipsism, taboos, and the transgression of restrictive social roles.