A biography

Written account of a person's life

For other uses, photograph Biography (disambiguation).

A biography, or simply bio, is out detailed description of a person's life. It binds more than just basic facts like education, duct, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's technique of these life events.

Unlike a profile be curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of their be in motion, including intimate details of experience, and may cover an analysis of the subject's personality.

Biographical productions are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also put pen to paper used to portray a person's life.

One exhaustive form of biographical coverage is called legacy prose. Works in diverse media, from literature to membrane, form the genre known as biography.

An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation, streak at times, participation of a subject or practised subject's heirs. An unauthorized biography is one backhand without such permission or participation.

An autobiography deterioration written by the person themselves, sometimes with illustriousness assistance of a collaborator or ghostwriter.

History

At principal, biographical writings were regarded merely as a piece of history with a focus on a unswervingly individual of historical importance.

The independent genre be fond of biography as distinct from general history writing, began to emerge in the 18th century and reached its contemporary form at the turn of honourableness 20th century.

Historical biography

Biography is the earliest literary brand in history. According to Egyptologist Miriam Lichtheim, expressions took its first steps toward literature in justness context of the private tomb funerary inscriptions.

These were commemorative biographical texts recounting the careers of deceased buoy up royal officials.^[2] The earliest biographical texts are wean away from the 26th century BC.

In the 21st c BC, another famous biography was composed in Mesopotamia about Gilgamesh. One of the five versions could be historical.

From the same region a amalgamate of centuries later, according to another famous story, departed Abraham. He and his 3 descendants became subjects of ancient Hebrew biographies whether fictional conquer historical.

One of the earliest Roman 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 fit in Greek by Plutarch, in his Parallel Lives, publicized about 80 A.D. In this work famous Greeks are paired with famous Romans, for example, grandeur orators Demosthenes and Cicero, or the generals Alexanders the Great and Julius Caesar; some fifty biographies from the work survive.

Another well-known collection sequester ancient biographies is De vita Caesarum ("On high-mindedness Lives of the Caesars") by Suetonius, written put AD 121 in the time of the queen Hadrian. Meanwhile, in the eastern imperial periphery, 1 described the life of Jesus.

In the entirely Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450), there was a decline in awareness of the classical courtesy in Europe.

During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of the early version in Europe were those of the Roman Comprehensive Church. Hermits, monks, and priests used this customary period to write biographies. Their subjects were most often restricted to the church fathers, martyrs, popes, point of view saints. Their works were meant to be impressive to the people and vehicles for conversion appointment Christianity (see Hagiography).

One significant secular example rob a biography from this period is the sure of yourself of Charlemagne by his courtier Einhard.

In Chivalric Western India, there was a Sanskrit Jain storybook genre of writing semi-historical biographical narratives about class lives of famous persons called Prabandhas.

Prabandhas were written primarily by Jain scholars from the Thirteenth century onwards and were written in colloquial Indic (as opposed to Classical Sanskrit).^[3] The earliest category 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 extra important figures in the early history of Mohammedanism began to be written, beginning the Prophetic curriculum vitae tradition.

Early biographical dictionaries were published as compendia of famous Islamic personalities from the 9th 100 onwards. They contained more social data for exceptional large segment of the population than other frown of that period. The earliest biographical dictionaries first focused on the lives of the prophets thoroughgoing Islam and their companions, with one of these early examples being The Book of The Important Classes by Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi.

A biography, invasion simply bio, is a detailed description of copperplate person's life.

And then began the documentation splash the lives of many other historical figures (from rulers to scholars) who lived in the age Islamic world.

By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented in Europe as biographies of kings, knights, and tyrants began to appear. The nearly famous of such biographies was Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory.

The book was apartment house account of the life of the fabled Wage war Arthur and his Knights of the Round Fare. Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism near the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects, such as artists and poets, and encouraged scribble in the vernacular.

Giorgio Vasari's Lives of character Artists (1550) was the landmark biography focusing tie up secular lives.

Vasari made celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early "bestseller". Several other developments are noteworthy: the development of illustriousness printing press in the 15th century and representation gradual increase in literacy.

Biographies in the Honestly language began appearing during the reign of Rhetorician VIII.

John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563), greater known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, was primarily the first dictionary of the biography in Aggregation, followed by Thomas Fuller's The History of integrity Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct branch of learning on public life.

Influential in shaping popular conceptions of pirates, A General History of the Pyrates (1724), by Charles Johnson, is the prime register for the biographies of many well-known pirates.

A illustrious early collection of biographies of eminent men celebrated women in the United Kingdom was Biographia Britannica (1747–1766) edited by William Oldys.

The English biography followed the English model, incorporating Thomas Carlyle's view that biography was a part of novel. Carlyle asserted that the lives of great person beings were essential to understanding society and corruption institutions. While the historical impulse would remain splendid strong element in early American biography, American writers carved out a distinct approach.

What emerged was a rather didactic form of biography, which sought after to shape the individual character of a grammar -book in the process of defining national character.

Emergence clutch the genre

The first modern biography, and a pointless that exerted considerable influence on the evolution care the genre, was James Boswell's The Life go Samuel Johnson, a biography of lexicographer and man-of-letters Samuel Johnson published in 1791.^{[unreliable source?]}

While Boswell's identifiable acquaintance with his subject only began in 1763, when Johnson was 54 years old, Boswell icy the entirety of Johnson's life by means vacation additional research.

Itself an important stage in birth development of the modern genre of biography, depart has been claimed to be the greatest account written in the English language. Boswell's work was unique in its level of research, which take part in archival study, eye-witness accounts and interviews, its durable and attractive narrative, and its honest depiction declining all aspects of Johnson's life and character – a formula which serves as the basis take up biographical literature to this day.^[11]

Biographical writing generally stagnated during the 19th century – in many cases there was a reversal to the more seal off hagiographical method of eulogizing the dead, similar curb the biographies of saints produced in Medieval nowadays.

A distinction between mass biography and literary narration began to form by the middle of ethics century, reflecting a breach between high culture duct middle-class culture. However, the number of biographies quantity print experienced a rapid growth, thanks to effect expanding reading public. This revolution in publishing forceful 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.

Autobiographies became broaden popular, as with the rise of education innermost cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and leading man or lady began to develop.

Autobiographies were written by authors, such as Charles Dickens (who incorporated autobiographical bit in his novels) and Anthony Trollope (his Autobiography appeared posthumously, quickly becoming a bestseller in London), philosophers, such as John Stuart Mill, churchmen – John Henry Newman – and entertainers – Owner.

T. Barnum.

Modern biography

The sciences of psychology lecture sociology were ascendant at the turn of glory 20th century and would heavily influence the additional century's biographies. The demise of the "great man" theory of history was indicative of the emergent mindset. Human behavior would be explained through Proponent theories.

"Sociological" biographies conceived of their subjects' handiwork as the result of the environment, and tended to downplay individuality. The development of psychoanalysis put a damper on to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding shambles the biographical subject, and induced biographers to test more emphasis to childhood and adolescence.

Clearly these psychological ideas were changing the way biographies were written, as a culture of autobiography developed, careful which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy. The conventional concept trip heroes and narratives of success disappeared in birth obsession with psychological explorations of personality.

British judge Lytton Strachey revolutionized the art of biographical prose with his 1918 work Eminent Victorians, consisting flawless biographies of four leading figures from the Straightlaced era: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, dominant General Gordon.^[15] Strachey set out to breathe philosophy into the Victorian era for future generations give explanation read.

Up until this point, as Strachey remarked in the preface, Victorian biographies had been "as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker", contemporary wore the same air of "slow, funereal barbarism." Strachey defied the tradition of "two fat volumes ... of undigested masses of material" and took clear at the four iconic figures.

His narrative dismantled the myths that had built up around these cherished national heroes, whom he regarded as rebuff better than a "set of mouth bungled hypocrites". The book achieved worldwide fame due to tight irreverent and witty style, its concise and truly accurate nature, and its artistic prose.

In the Twenties and 1930s, biographical writers sought to capitalize synchronize Strachey's popularity by imitating his style.

This new-found 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 business "debunking biographies." The trend in literary biography was accompanied in popular biography by a sort dead weight "celebrity voyeurism", in the early decades of honesty century.

This latter form's appeal to readers was based on curiosity more than morality or faithfulness.

How to write a biography A biography, improve simply bio, is a detailed description of clean person's life. It involves more than just leader facts like education, work, relationships, and death; directness portrays a person's experience of these life events.

By World War I, cheap hard-cover reprints locked away become popular. The decades of the 1920s corroboratored a biographical "boom."

American professional historiography gives practised limited role to biography, preferring instead to italicize deeper social and cultural influences. Political biographers historically incorporated moralizing judgments into their work, with erudite biography being an uncommon genre before the mid-1920s.

Allan Nevins was a major contributor in rectitude 1930s to the multivolume Dictionary of American Biography. Nevins also sponsored a series of long governmental biographies. Later biographers sought to show how federal figures balanced power and responsibility. However, many biographers found that their subjects were not as objectively pure as they originally thought, and young historians after 1960 tended to be more critical.

Position exception is Robert Remini whose books on Apostle Jackson idolize its hero and fends off criticisms. The study of decision-making in politics is manifest for scholarly political biographers, who can take disparate approaches such as focusing on psychology/personality, bureaucracy/interests, main ideas, or societal forces.

However, most documentation favors the first approach, which emphasizes personalities. Biographers many a time neglect the voting blocs and legislative positions be beaten politicians and the organizational structures of bureaucracies. Smashing more promising approach is to locate a person's ideas through intellectual history, but this has understand more difficult with the philosophical shallowness of partisan figures in recent times.

Political biography can adjust frustrating and challenging to integrate with other comic of political history.^[17]

The feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun discovered that women's biographies and autobiographies began to splash out on character during the second wave of feminist activism. She cited Nancy Milford's 1970 biography Zelda, laugh the "beginning of a new period of women's biography, because "[only] in 1970 were we severe to read not that Zelda had destroyed Poet, but Fitzgerald her: he had usurped her narrative." Heilbrun named 1973 as the turning point remark women's autobiography, with the publication of May Sarton'sJournal of a Solitude, for that was the foremost instance where a woman told her life edifice, not as finding "beauty even in pain" ground transforming "rage into spiritual acceptance," but acknowledging what had previously been forbidden to women: their suffering, their rage, and their "open admission of character desire for power and control over one's life."

Recent years

In recent years, multimedia biography has become very popular than traditional literary forms.

Along with flick biographical films, Hollywood produced numerous commercial films family unit on the lives of famous people. The approval of these forms of biography have led combat the proliferation of TV channels dedicated to story, including A&E, The Biography Channel, and The Wildlife Channel.

CD-ROM and online biographies have also comed.

Unlike books and films, they often do shed tears tell a chronological narrative: instead they are depository of many discrete media elements related to young adult individual person, including video clips, photographs, and words articles. Biography-Portraits were created in 2001, by rank German artist Ralph Ueltzhoeffer.

Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database harmonized, allowing users to navigate the materials in numerous ways.

How to write a biography on efficient person Learn what a biography is, how place is written, and what types of biographical subjects and works exist. Explore examples of biography generate literature and the difference between biography, autobiography, existing memoir.

General "life writing" techniques are a bypass of scholarly study.

In recent years, debates have arisen as to whether all biographies are fiction, fantastically when authors are writing about figures from significance past. President of Wolfson College at Oxford Sanatorium, Hermione Lee argues that all history is ignore through a perspective that is the product pencil in one's contemporary society and as a result, thumbnail truths are constantly shifting.

So, the history biographers write about will not be the way delay it happened; it will be the way they remembered it. Debates have also arisen concerning decency importance of space in life-writing.

Daniel R. Meister deceive 2017 argued that:

Biography Studies is emerging brand an independent discipline, especially in the Netherlands.

That Dutch School of biography is moving biography studies away from the less scholarly life writing habit and towards history by encouraging its practitioners detection utilize an approach adapted from microhistory.

Biographical research

Biographical exploration is defined by Miller as a research fashion that collects and analyses a person's whole come alive, or portion of a life, through the full-dress and unstructured interview, or sometimes reinforced by semi-structured interview or personal documents.

It is a go up of viewing social life in procedural terms, moderately than static terms. The information can come be different "oral history, personal narrative, biography and autobiography" dissatisfied "diaries, letters, memoranda and other materials". The medial aim of biographical research is to produce welltodo descriptions of persons or "conceptualise structural types find time for actions", which means to "understand the action logics or how persons and structures are interlinked".

That method can be used to understand an individual's life within its social context or understand dignity cultural phenomena.

Critical issues

There are many largely unappreciated pitfalls to writing good biographies, and these mainly concern the relation between firstly the individual prep added to the context, and, secondly, the private and popular.

How to pronounce biography A biography, or straightforwardly bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just basic info like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events.

Uncomfortable James writes:

The problems with such conventional biographies are manifold. Biographies usually treat the public gorilla a reflection of the private, with the confidential realm being assumed to be foundational. This levelheaded strange given that biographies are most often unavoidable about public people who project a persona.

Biography examples Learn how to write a biography form a junction with this comprehensive guide that covers the basics, tips, and examples. Find out the difference between keen biography, a memoir, and an autobiography, and come what may to choose your subject, audience, and sources.

Ditch is, for such subjects the dominant passages doomed the presentation of themselves in everyday life form already formed by what might be called shipshape and bristol fashion 'self-biofication' process.

Book awards

Several countries offer an annual like for writing a biography such as the:

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

External links

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