For other uses, see Biography (disambiguation).

For the Wikipedia policy on biographies of living persons, see Wikipedia:Biographies of living
persons.

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 his or her 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 himself or herself,
sometimes with the assistance of a collaborator or ghostwriter.

Contents
 1 History
o 1.1 Historical biography
o 1.2 Emergence of the genre
o 1.3 Modern biography
o 1.4 Recent years
o 1.5 Biographical research
o 1.6 Critical issues
 2 Book awards
 3 See also
 4 References
 o 4.1 Citations
o 4.2 Sources
 5 External 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 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.[2]

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.[3]
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.[4][5]

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.[6] 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.[7]

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.[4]

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[8]), 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.[5] 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.[4]
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.[9] 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.[10]

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."[11]