Biography

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Third Volume of a 1727 edition of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans printed by Jacob Tonson

A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more

than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a
person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a
biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of their life,
including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of the subject's
personality.
Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a
person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Works
in diverse media, from literature to film, form the genre known as biography.
An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation, and at times,
participation of a subject or a subject's heirs. An autobiography is written by the person
themselves, sometimes with the assistance of a collaborator or ghostwriter.

Contents

• 1History
o 1.1Historical biography
o 1.2Emergence of the genre
o 1.3Modern biography
o 1.4Recent years
o 1.5Biographical research
o 1.6Critical issues
 • 2Book awards
• 3See also
• 4Notes
• 5References
• 6Further reading
• 7External links

History
At first, biographical writings were regarded merely as a subsection of history with a
focus on a particular individual of historical importance. The independent genre of
biography as distinct from general history writing, began to emerge in the 18th century
and reached its contemporary form at the turn of the 20th century.[1]
Historical biography

Einhard as scribe

One of the earliest biographers was Cornelius Nepos, who published his
work Excellentium Imperatorum Vitae ("Lives of outstanding generals") in 44 BC.
Longer and more extensive biographies were written in Greek by Plutarch, in
his Parallel Lives, published about 80 A.D. In this work famous Greeks are paired with
famous Romans, for example the orators Demosthenes and Cicero, or the
generals Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar; some fifty biographies from the work
survive. Another well-known collection of ancient biographies is De vita Caesarum ("On
the Lives of the Caesars") by Suetonius, written about AD 121 in the time of the
emperor Hadrian.
In the early Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450), there was a decline in awareness of
the classical culture in Europe. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and
records of the early history in Europe were those of the Roman Catholic
Church. Hermits, monks, and priests used this historic period to write biographies. Their
subjects were usually restricted to the church fathers, martyrs, popes, and saints. Their
works were meant to be inspirational to the people and vehicles
for conversion to Christianity (see Hagiography). One significant secular example of a
biography from this period is the life of Charlemagne by his courtier Einhard.
In Medieval Western India, there was a Sanskrit Jain literary genre of writing semi-
historical biographical narratives about the lives of famous persons called Prabandhas.
Prabandhas were written primarily by Jain scholars from 13th century onwards and
were written in colloquial Sanskrit (as opposed to Classical Sanskrit).[2] The earliest
collection explicitly titled Prabandha- is Jinabhadra's Prabandhavali (1234 CE).
In Medieval Islamic Civilization (c. AD 750 to 1258), similar traditional Muslim
biographies of Muhammad and other important figures in the early history of
Islam began to be written, beginning the Prophetic biography tradition.
Early biographical dictionaries were published as compendia of famous Islamic
personalities from the 9th century onwards. They contained more social data for a large
segment of the population than other works of that period. The earliest biographical
dictionaries initially focused on the lives of the prophets of Islam and their companions,
with one of these early examples being The Book of The Major Classes by Ibn Sa'd al-
Baghdadi. And then began the documentation of the lives of many other historical
figures (from rulers to scholars) who lived in the medieval Islamic world. [3]

John Foxe's The Book of Martyrs, was one of the earliest English-language biographies.

By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented in Europe as

biographies of kings, knights, and tyrants began to appear. The most famous of such
biographies was Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. The book was an account of
the life of the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Following Malory,
the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular
subjects, such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular.
Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) was the landmark biography focusing on
secular lives. Vasari made celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early
"bestseller". Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the printing
press in the 15th century and the gradual increase in literacy.
Biographies in the English language began appearing during the reign of Henry
VIII. John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of
Martyrs, was essentially the first dictionary of the biography in Europe, followed
by Thomas Fuller's The History of the Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct focus
on public life.
Influential in shaping popular conceptions of pirates, A General History of the
Pyrates (1724), by Charles Johnson, is the prime source for the biographies of many
well-known pirates.[4]
A notable early collection of biographies of eminent men and women in the United
Kingdom was Biographia Britannica (1747-1766) edited by William Oldys.
The American biography followed the English model, incorporating Thomas Carlyle's
view that biography was a part of history. Carlyle asserted that the lives of great human
beings were essential to understanding society and its institutions. While the historical
impulse would remain a strong element in early American biography, American writers
carved out a distinct approach. What emerged was a rather didactic form of biography,
which sought to shape the individual character of a reader in the process of defining
national character.[5][6]
Emergence of the genre

James Boswell wrote what many consider to be the first modern biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, in
1791.

The first modern biography, and a work which exerted considerable influence on the
evolution of the genre, was James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, a biography
of lexicographer and man-of-letters Samuel Johnson published in 1791.[7][unreliable source?][8][9]
While Boswell's personal acquaintance with his subject only began in 1763, when
Johnson was 54 years old, Boswell covered the entirety of Johnson's life by means of
additional research. Itself an important stage in the development of the modern genre of
biography, it has been claimed to be the greatest biography written in the English
language. Boswell's work was unique in its level of research, which involved archival
study, eye-witness accounts and interviews, its robust and attractive narrative, and its
honest depiction of all aspects of Johnson's life and character – a formula which serves
as the basis of biographical literature to this day.[10]
Biographical writing generally stagnated during the 19th century – in many cases there
was a reversal to the more familiar hagiographical method of eulogizing the dead,
similar to the biographies of saints produced in Medieval times. A distinction between
mass biography and literary biography began to form by the middle of the century,
reflecting a breach between high culture and middle-class culture. However, the number
of biographies in print experienced a rapid growth, thanks to an expanding reading
public. This revolution in publishing made books available to a larger audience of
readers. In addition, affordable paperback editions of popular biographies were
published for the first time. Periodicals began publishing a sequence of biographical
sketches.[11]
Autobiographies became more popular, as with the rise of education and cheap printing,
modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop. Autobiographies were written
by authors, such as Charles Dickens (who incorporated autobiographical elements in
his novels) and Anthony Trollope, (his Autobiography appeared posthumously, quickly
becoming a bestseller in London[12]), philosophers, such as John Stuart Mill, churchmen
– John Henry Newman – and entertainers – P. T. Barnum.
Modern biography
The sciences of psychology and sociology were ascendant at the turn of the 20th
century and would heavily influence the new century's biographies.[13] The demise of
the "great man" theory of history was indicative of the emerging mindset. Human
behavior would be explained through Darwinian theories. "Sociological" biographies
conceived of their subjects' actions as the result of the environment, and tended to
downplay individuality. The development of psychoanalysis led to a more penetrating
and comprehensive understanding of the biographical subject, and induced biographers
to give more emphasis to childhood and adolescence. Clearly these psychological ideas
were changing the way biographies were written, as a culture of autobiography
developed, in which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy.[11] The
conventional concept of heroes and narratives of success disappeared in the obsession
with psychological explorations of personality.
Eminent Victorians set the standard for 20th century biographical writing, when it was published in 1918.

British critic Lytton Strachey revolutionized the art of biographical writing with his 1918
work Eminent Victorians, consisting of biographies of four leading figures from
the Victorian era: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General
Gordon.[14] Strachey set out to breathe life into the Victorian era for future generations to
read. Up until this point, as Strachey remarked in the preface, Victorian biographies had
been "as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker", and wore the same air of "slow,
funereal barbarism." Strachey defied the tradition of "two fat volumes ... of undigested
masses of material" and took aim at the four iconic figures. His narrative demolished the
myths that had built up around these cherished national heroes, whom he regarded as
no better than a "set of mouth bungled hypocrites". The book achieved worldwide fame
due to its irreverent and witty style, its concise and factually accurate nature, and its
artistic prose.[15]
In the 1920s and '30s, biographical writers sought to capitalize on Strachey's popularity
by imitating his style. This new school featured iconoclasts, scientific analysts, and
fictional biographers and included Gamaliel Bradford, André Maurois, and Emil Ludwig,
among others. Robert Graves (I, Claudius, 1934) stood out among those following
Strachey's model of "debunking biographies." The trend in literary biography was
accompanied in popular biography by a sort of "celebrity voyeurism", in the early
decades of the century. This latter form's appeal to readers was based on curiosity
more than morality or patriotism. By World War I, cheap hard-cover reprints had
become popular. The decades of the 1920s witnessed a biographical "boom."
The feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun observed that women's biographies and
autobiographies began to change character during the second wave
of feminist activism. She cited Nancy Milford's 1970 biography Zelda, as the "beginning
of a new period of women's biography, because "[only] in 1970 were we ready to read
not that Zelda had destroyed Fitzgerald, but Fitzgerald her: he had usurped her
narrative." Heilbrun named 1973 as the turning point in women's autobiography, with
the publication of May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, for that was the first instance
where a woman told her life story, not as finding "beauty even in pain" and transforming
"rage into spiritual acceptance," but acknowledging what had previously been forbidden
to women: their pain, their rage, and their "open admission of the desire for power and
control over one's life."[16]
Recent years
In recent years, multimedia biography has become more popular than traditional literary
forms. Along with documentary biographical films, Hollywood produced numerous
commercial films based on the lives of famous people. The popularity of these forms of
biography have led to the proliferation of TV channels dedicated to biography,
including A&E, The Biography Channel, and The History Channel.
CD-ROM and online biographies have also appeared. Unlike books and films, they
often do not tell a chronological narrative: instead they are archives of many discrete
media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and
text articles. Biography-Portraits were created in 2001, by the German artist Ralph
Ueltzhoeffer. Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the
database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways.[17] General "life
writing" techniques are a subject of scholarly study.[18]
In recent years, debates have arisen as to whether all biographies are fiction, especially
when authors are writing about figures from the past. President of Wolfson College at
Oxford University, Hermione Lee argues that all history is seen through a perspective
that is the product of one's contemporary society and as a result, biographical truths are
constantly shifting. So, the history biographers write about will not be the way that it
happened; it will be the way they remembered it.[19] Debates have also arisen concerning
the importance of space in life-writing.[20]
Daniel R. Meister in 2017 argued that:
Biography Studies is emerging as an independent
discipline, especially in the Netherlands. This Dutch
School of biography is moving biography studies away
from the less scholarly life writing tradition and towards
history by encouraging its practitioners to utilize an
approach adapted from microhistory.[21]
Biographical research
Biographical research is defined by Miller as a research
method that collects and analyses a person's whole life, or
portion of a life, through the in-depth and unstructured
interview, or sometimes reinforced by semi-structured
interview or personal documents.[22] It is a way of viewing
social life in procedural terms, rather than static terms. The
information can come from "oral history, personal narrative,
biography and autobiography" or "diaries, letters,
memoranda and other materials".[23] The central aim of
biographical research is to produce rich descriptions of
persons or "conceptualise structural types of actions",
which means to "understand the action logics or how
persons and structures are interlinked".[24] This method can
be used to understand an individual's life within its social
context or understand the cultural phenomena.
Critical issues
There are many largely unacknowledged pitfalls to writing
good biographies, and these largely concern the relation
between firstly the individual and the context, and,
secondly, the private and public. Paul James writes:
The problems with such conventional biographies are
manifold. Biographies usually treat the public as a reflection
of the private, with the private realm being assumed to be
foundational. This is strange given that biographies are
most often written about public people who project
a persona. That is, for such subjects the dominant
passages of the presentation of themselves in everyday life
are already formed by what might be called a 'self-
biofication' process.[25]

Book awards
Several countries offer an annual prize for writing a
biography such as the:

• Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize – Canada

• National Biography Award – Australia
• Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography –
United States
• Whitbread Prize for Best Biography – United
Kingdom
• J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography – United
Kingdom
• Prix Goncourt de la Biographie – France

See also

• Biography portal

• Historiography
• Historiography of science
• Historiography of the United Kingdom
• Historiography of the United States
• Legal biography
• Letter collection
• Psychobiography

Notes
1. ^ Kendall.
2. ^ Thaker, Jayant Premshankar
(1970). Laghuprabandhasaṅgrahah. Oriental Institute.
p. 18.
3. ^ Nawas 2006, p. 110.
4. ^ Johnson 2002, p. ?.
5. ^ Casper 1999, p. ?.
6. ^ Stone 1982, p. ?.
7. ^ Butler 2012.
8. ^ Ingram et al. 1998, pp. 319–320.
9. ^ Turnbull 2019.
 10. ^ Brocklehurst, Steven (16 May 2013). "James Boswell:
The Man who Re-Invented Biography". BBC News.
Retrieved 1 February 2016.
11. ^ Jump up to:a b Casper 1999.
12. ^ Roberts 1883, p. 13.
13. ^ Stone 1982.
14. ^ Levy, Paul (20 July 2002). "A String Quartet in Four
Movements". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 1
February 2016.
15. ^ Jones 2009.
16. ^ Heilbrun 1988, pp. 12, 13.
17. ^ Manovich 2001, p. 220.
18. ^ Hughes 2009, p. 159.
19. ^ Derham 2014.
20. ^ Regard 2003.
21. ^ Meister 2018, p. 2.
22. ^ Miller 2003, p. 15.
23. ^ Roberts 2002.
24. ^ Zinn 2004, p. 3.
25. ^ James 2013, p. 124.

References
• Butler, Paul (19 April 2012). "James Boswell's 'Life of
Johnson': The First Modern Biography". University of Mary
Washington Libraries. Archived from the original on 11
November 2014. Retrieved 1 February 2016.
• Casper, Scott E. (1999). Constructing American Lives:
Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-
8078-4765-7.
• Derham, Katie (2014) [First published in 2014]. The Art of
Life: Are Biographies Fiction? (MP4) (Video). Stephen
Frears, Hermione Lee, Ray Monk. Institute of Arts and Ideas.
Retrieved 1 February 2016.
• Heilbrun, Carolyn G. (1988). Writing a Woman's Life. New
York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-02601-6.
• Hughes, Kathryn (2009). "Review of Teaching Life Writing
Texts, ed. Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes" (PDF). Journal of
Historical Biography. 5: 159–163. ISSN 1911-8538.
Retrieved 1 February 2016.
• Johnson, Charles (2002). A General History of the Robberies
& Murders of the most Notorious Pirates. London: Conway
Maritime. ISBN 0-85177-919-0.
• Ingram, Allan; Rawson, Claude; Waingrow, Marshall; Boswell,
James (1998). "James Boswell's 'Life of Johnson': An Edition
of the Original Manuscript, in Four Volumes. Vol. 1. 1709-
1765". The Yearbook of English Studies. 28: 319–
320. doi:10.2307/3508791. JSTOR 3508791.
• James, Paul (2013). "Closing Reflections: Confronting
Contradictions in Biographies of Nations and
Peoples". Humanities Research. 19 (1): 124.
 • Jones, Malcolm (28 October 2009). "Boswell, Johnson, & the
Birth of Modern Biography". Newsweek. New
York. ISSN 0028-9604. Retrieved 31 January 2016.
• Kendall, Paul Murray. "Biography". Encyclopædia Britannica.
• Lee, Hermione (2009). Biography: A Very Short Introduction.
Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-953354-1.
• Manovich, Lev (2001). The Language of New Media.
Leonardo Book Series. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press. ISBN 978-0-262-63255-3.
• Meister, Daniel R. (2018). "The biographical turn and the case
for historical biography". History Compass. 16 (1):
2. doi:10.1111/hic3.12436. ISSN 1478-0542.
• Miller, Robert L. (2003). "Biographical Method". In Miller,
Robert L.; Brewer, John D. (eds.). The A–Z of Social
Research: A Dictionary of Key Social Science Research
Concepts. London: Sage Publications. pp. 15–17. ISBN 978-
0-7619-7133-7.
• Nawas, John A. (2006). "Biography and Biographical Works".
In Meri, Josef W. (ed.). Medieval Islamic Civilization: An
Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. New York: Routledge. pp. 110–
112. ISBN 978-0-415-96691-7.
• Regard, Frédéric, ed. (2003). Mapping the Self: Space,
Identity, Discourse in British Auto/Biography. Saint-Étienne,
France: Publications de l'Université de Saint-
Étienne. ISBN 978-2-86272269-6.
• Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1918). "Biography". Encyclopedia
Americana. Vol. 3. pp. 718–719.
• Roberts, Brian (2002). Biographical Research. Understanding
Social Research. Buckingham, England: Open University
Press. ISBN 978-0-335-20287-4.
• Roberts, Charles George Douglas, ed. (6 December
1883). "Literary Gossip". The Week. Vol. 1, no. 1. p. 13.
• Stone, Albert E. (1982). Autobiographical Occasions and
Original Acts: Versions of American Identity from Henry
Adams to Nate Shaw. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-7845-3.
• Turnbull, Gordon (2019-10-10). "Boswell, James (1740–
1795), lawyer, diarist, and biographer of Samuel
Johnson". Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (online ed.). Oxford University
Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/2950. Retrieved 2020-05-
14. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Zinn, Jens O. (2004). Introduction to Biographical
Research (Working paper 2004/4). Canterbury, England:
Social Contexts and Responses to Risk Network, University of
Kent.

Further reading
• Gosse, Edmund William (1911). "Biography" . In
Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica.
Vol. 3 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
pp. 952–954.
 • Sidney Lee (1911), Principles of Biography,
London: Cambridge University
Press, Wikidata Q107333538

External links
• "Biography", In Our Time, BBC Radio 4
discussion with Richard Holmes, Nigel Hamilton
and Amanda Foreman (June 22, 2000).
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