Biography is the story of a person’s life written by someone else. The word biography comes from the Greek words meaning a life and to write. An autobiography is a person’s story of his or her own life. See Autobiography.
Biographies help make the past more real and easier to understand because they tell about actual people and the times in which they lived. By reading biographies, people can satisfy their curiosity about famous, important, or interesting individuals and can experience historical events from the perspective of those who lived through them.
A good biography presents a range of information about a person’s life. A biography also should describe the subject’s nature and character, while providing an explanation for why he or she acted in certain ways.
Biographers help make their writings accurate by learning as much as possible about their subjects. Biographers use such research materials as diaries, public records, financial accounts, personal communications, and autobiographies.
Most biographies are interpretative. They not only present facts but also try to explain what they mean. A good biographical work should be objective and balanced. However, these goals cannot always be achieved. For example, a biographer might not be able to write about all aspects of the subject’s life because of a lack of background material. Many individuals do not leave diaries, recordings, letters, or internet postings, or such materials may have been lost, destroyed, or made unavailable.
Some actions or choices in a person’s life may not be easily explained, no matter how hard biographers try to understand them. Some biographers deliberately present a one-sided view of their subject. They may distort a person’s life by presenting only facts that portray him or her in an unflattering way. Other biographers may present only favorable information about the subject.
Forms of biography
There are five chief types of biography: (1) popular, (2) historical, (3) literary and artistic, (4) reference, and (5) fictional.
Popular biographies
are perhaps the most common form of biography. They tell about the lives of such currently famous people as politicians, singers, movie stars and sports figures. Cable television and internet resources now provide popular biographies, often adding visual material and personal interviews.
Historical biographies
deal with a wide variety of individuals and describe how they influenced past events. These works also tell what life was like during certain times by linking biographical subjects with the larger patterns or forces of history surrounding them.
Literary and artistic biographies
tell of the life and personality of an author, painter, or other kind of artist. Such biographies also try to describe the talent and inspiration that enabled the subject to create or perform great works.
Reference biographies
are the simplest type of biography. They are short accounts that mention only the major events of a person’s life. Resources that provide such biographies include biographical dictionaries and major encyclopedias. Internet search engines can speedily locate brief biographies for thousands of subjects.
Fictional biographies
combine features of a biography with fictional elements. They are biographies because they are based on real people and events. They are fictional because they include conversations, invented scenes, and additional stories to imagine the fuller nature of a life.
History
Early biographies.
The first biographies were inscriptions on the tombs of rulers of ancient Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt. These inscriptions merely glorified the individual.
Early biographies also appear in the Hebrew Bible. Many biographical stories in the Bible reveal brief histories of a people or the development of an entire nation. They include stories about Abraham, Moses, and David. Other writings were didactic—that is, they taught a moral lesson. For example, the story of Ruth teaches loyalty.
The first true biographers came from ancient Greece and Rome. The Greek historian Herodotus’s Histories, from the 400’s B.C., includes many biographical stories and legends, primarily about Cyrus and Xerxes, two Persian kings. The Greek philosopher Plato’s dialogues contain biographical information about Socrates, another Greek philosopher, especially in the Apology. This dialogue describes the legal proceedings against Socrates in Athens in 399 B.C.
Plutarch, a Greek, wrote Parallel Lives of Illustrious Greeks and Romans about A.D. 100. These biographies were more objective than earlier ones. Plutarch sought to understand his subjects, not simply glorify them. He also achieved greater accuracy than previous biographers. However, he accepted myths, legends, and hearsay as facts.
Two Roman writers, Tacitus and Suetonius, also used modern biographical techniques. Tacitus wrote Agricola (A.D. 98?), a biography of his father-in-law, a famous Roman general. This work is considered the first biography to deal effectively with both the career and personality of the subject. Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars (A.D. 121?) was popular because it included scandal as well as facts.
The life of Jesus Christ inspired the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Gospels, which form most of the New Testament, were short biographies written for religious purposes. They focused primarily on the last year of Jesus’s life.
The Middle Ages.
The Christian church was the most important institution in the West during the Middle Ages. This was the period in European history from about the 400’s through the 1400’s. Biographies of that period reflect the church’s influence. Writings about saints became the principal form of biography. These works, called hagiographies, rarely tell about the subject’s career or personality. Instead, the writers chose certain events in a saint’s life to give Christians an example of pious living. Hagiographies had a standard form. They told of such acts by the saint as the performance of miracles and the conversion of nonbelievers.
In the medieval Arabic world, dozens of biographies recounted stories about Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and the rise of the religion. The Qur’ān, the sacred text of Islam, includes details from the life of Muhammad. Biographies of people who knew Muhammad, and of his followers, were also of great importance in the Islamic world. So were the biographies of various caliphs (Islamic rulers).
In India, the first important biography written in the ancient Indian language called Sanskrit was the Harshacarita (Deeds of Harsa, A.D. 600’s). The book was an account of the early life of a king in northern India, written by the Indian author Bana. In the Hindi language, accounts of kings and princes were a major feature of court literature. They were often in poetic and epic form. An example is a saga about the great king Prithviraj, written about A.D. 1200 by the court poet Chand Bardai.
In China and Japan, writings included biographical records of emperors and their courts. There are also collections of the lives of holy men, such as biographies of eminent priests of the Liang Dynasty of the early A.D. 500’s. These were hagiographical accounts of the lives of Chinese Buddhist monks. They were filled with descriptions of wonders and marvels and were designed to spread the Buddhist faith. Court writing in Japan in kanji (Chinese characters) also presented partial biographies of aristocratic figures. Such accounts included Pillow Book (about A.D. 1000) by Sei Shonagon.
During the 1300’s, an intellectual movement called humanism spread. Humanism emphasized the importance, dignity, and achievements of human beings, particularly of individual people. The Italian writers Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio expressed the humanist concept in their works. Petrarch told about famous Romans in his unfinished Lives of Famous Men. Boccaccio wrote Life of Dante (1355), a biography of the famous poet.
The Renaissance.
The changes in biography started by Petrarch and Boccaccio spread rapidly through Europe during the Renaissance. This was an age of reborn interest in the classical culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Scholars were inspired by the writings of such classical authors as Plutarch and Suetonius, and used their works as models.
Renaissance biographers concentrated on the personalities of their subjects. The emphasis in biographies also shifted from religious subjects to such secular (nonreligious) people as rulers and military leaders. Giorgio Vasari, an Italian, described each of his subjects as a person in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550). Pierre Matthieu of France wrote Histoire des derniers troubles de France (1694-1695), a work containing many biographical pieces that reflected the influence of Plutarch and Suetonius.
John Foxe of England, in The Book of Martyrs (1563), described the lives of Protestant martyrs. His biographies focused more attention on their subjects as human beings than had the hagiographies of the Middle Ages. Other English biographers included Thomas More, author of The History of King Richard III, which was written about 1513; and William Roper, More’s son-in-law, who wrote movingly about More’s personal life and political difficulties. Several authors contributed to a series of biographies, most of them about royalty, called A Mirror for Magistrates (1559-1610).
In India, the Mughal Empire that controlled most of the continent honored their leaders with elaborate biographical writing. The most famous account is the Akbarnama by Abul Fazl. This multivolume biography deals with the life and times of the Mughal emperor Akbar in the late 1500’s
The 1600’s.
The trends begun by Renaissance biographers were continued by many writers of the 1600’s in England and continental Europe. These authors also strove for honesty and accuracy in their works. Izaak Walton of England wrote biographies of five prominent English clergymen, poets, and statesmen. Walton did extensive research on his subjects, though he emphasized the favorable features of the lives he retold. However, he did not tell all the personal details of their lives. Walton’s interest in the personalities and careers of his subjects, together with his own literary style, gave his works an almost leisurely modern quality.
John Aubrey, another English author, wrote Brief Lives between 1669 and 1696, but it was not published until 1813. This work includes personal details of the subjects’ lives and reflects Aubrey’s interest in their unusual traits. However, he did not distinguish clearly between gossip and fact.
The late 1600’s also saw a boom in commercial printing and a hunger among a growing class of readers for books detailing many lives and activities. There was an increasing demand for biographies of criminals, military figures, explorers, world travelers, and even clergymen and landowners.
The 1700’s
were a great age of biography. Writers produced scholarly, readable biographical works by combining literary skill and historical accuracy. Interest in martyrs and saints diminished. Biographers concentrated on secular subjects. They used a variety of research materials, checked their facts carefully, and avoided hearsay, legends, and myths. Pierre Bayle of France, author of the Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), called for a skeptical approach to biographical research.
During the 1700’s, the novel became an important form of literature. Novelists used their skills to write lives of real people. They supplemented known facts with imagined circumstances. The English writer Henry Fielding wrote a brilliant narrative of the life of the thief Jonathan Wild in The Life of Mister Jonathan Wild the Great (1743). Most of the memorable novels of the period imitated biographical and autobiographical techniques, even for invented characters, as in the English writer Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749).
Biographers in the late 1700’s were heavily influenced by the skills of novelists and paid more attention to literary style. The English author Horace Walpole wrote Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768) in a witty, entertaining manner. This book served as a model for other writers.
Samuel Johnson of England was one of the greatest biographers of his time. He was also the subject of one of the finest biographies ever written. Johnson wrote The Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744) and The Lives of the English Poets (1779-1781). He became known for his accurate, though sharp, views and his profound ethical judgments. Johnson is best remembered, however, as the subject of James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Boswell, a Scottish writer, had known Johnson for many years and combined his own observations of the man with those of others. He added a keen analytical element, explaining how and why Johnson thought and acted as he did. Boswell also had full access to Johnson’s personal documents and letters.
The 1800’s.
Boswell’s style influenced many biographers of the 1800’s, but they did not achieve his depth of insight. Some scholars wrote biographies that did not give complete accounts because they presented only the respectable side of their subjects. As a result, many biographies of the 1800’s were dull and one-sided. Fictional biographies, however, retained their excitement and adventure. Examples include novels by two English writers, Oliver Twist (1839) by Charles Dickens and Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë. 
Some authors of the 1800’s raised biography to a form of great historical writing. One was Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish historian who explored the life and writings of the English statesman Oliver Cromwell in Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations (1845). He described the career of the Prussian emperor of the 1700’s in History of Friedrich II of Prussia, called Frederick the Great (1858-1865). Carlyle thought biographies should completely cover the subject’s character and cultural influence. Thomas Babington Macaulay, an English historian, followed Carlyle’s approach. Macaulay’s The History of England from the Accession of James II (1848-1861) presents his subjects as major actors in sweeping historical dramas.
James Anthony Froude, an English historian, became one of the first biographers to present both the favorable and unfavorable sides of a subject. His Thomas Carlyle (1882-1884) set forth details of Carlyle’s personal life that shocked many readers.
In continental Europe, a newer form of biography associated with historical principles produced reevaluations of religious and legendary figures. For example, the French religious historian Ernest Renan wrote Life of Jesus (1863), which applied modern research standards to the life and times of Jesus in Palestine. In addition, biography on the European continent increasingly became a mode of cultural analysis. The many literary portraits written by the French critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve are an example. These portraits were collected under the title Monday Chats (1851-1862).
Works by many American biographers of the 1800’s resembled those of English writers. Biographers of the heroes of the American Revolution (1775-1783) attempted to create a spirit of nationalism, and their works became especially popular. These authors’ works tended to present only the respectable side of their subjects. For example, Mason Locke Weems presented stories in his The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington (1800-1806) that made Washington appear faultless. Jared Sparks, another American biographer, actually changed the wording of Washington’s letters to make him appear more learned and well-bred. Henry Adams was a far more critical biographer, especially in his works on American political figures, as in John Randolph (1882).
In the late 1800’s, multivolume biographical dictionaries began to be compiled in England, prepared by groups of authors. The first such dictionary was The Dictionary of National Biography (1885-…), led by Leslie Stephen. Later, American compilers prepared entries for the Dictionary of American Biography (1926-1937) and American National Biography (1999).
Modern biography.
The traditional biographical form was challenged in the early 1900’s by the new science of psychology. The theories of Sigmund Freud, an Austrian physician, were especially influential. Freud believed that many of a person’s actions resulted from unconscious motivation—that is, from reasons unknown even to the individual. Freud developed the psychoanalytic theory to help uncover these unconscious motives (see Psychoanalysis ).
Freud was one of the first people to use the psychoanalytic theory in writing a biography. In Leonardo da Vinci (1910), he used it to explain the personality of the famous artist of the Italian Renaissance. Throughout the 1900’s, psychoanalytic theory had become so commonplace that the American writer Frederick Crews made fun of the fad in his satiric biography of the children’s literature character Winnie-the-Pooh in The Pooh Perplex (1963).
About 1900, biographers also began to write more popular and lively works. Hilaire Belloc, a British author, enlivened his Danton (1899) and Marie Antoinette (1909) by inventing details of the subjects’ lives. André Maurois of France and Emil Ludwig of Germany wrote fictional biographies, using real people but inventing most or all of the dialogue.
Authors started to develop a more scholarly form of biography in the early and middle 1900’s. Several works by American writers, including Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln (1926-1939) and Douglas Southall Freeman’s R. E. Lee (1934-1935), were both readable and thoroughly researched. 
Generally, biographers of the 1900’s examined in much greater detail the financial and sexual lives of their subjects. Books called debunking biographies also became popular. These works deliberately questioned the reputation of great heroes. Lytton Strachey of England wrote Eminent Victorians (1918), which portrayed several celebrated English people of the 1800’s as less than perfect. In the United States, authors of debunking biographies wrote about such national heroes as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. John Dos Passos included debunking biographical portraits of real people in his three novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). They were collected as U.S.A. (1938).
Biography today
Biographies of historical and literary figures have gained a wide audience. They include such analytical works as James Joyce (1959) by Richard Ellmann of the United States, Mary, Queen of Scots (1969) by Antonia Fraser of the United Kingdom, Virginia Woolf (1972) by Quentin Bell of the United Kingdom, John Keats (1963) and Samuel Johnson (1977) by W. Jackson Bate of the United States, and The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (1985) by Kenneth Silverman of the United States. Later analytical biographies include W. E. B. Du Bois (2 volumes, 1994, 2001) by David Levering Lewis; John Adams (2001) by David McCullough; Andrew Carnegie (2006) by David Nasaw; and Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1998), Alexander Hamilton (2004), and Grant (2017) by Ron Chernow, all of the United States. Several authors have written biographies of presidents and their families, especially the Roosevelts and the Kennedys. The American historian Robert Caro wrote a multivolume biography (1982-…) of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
A relatively new form of modern biography treats the lives of connected figures. Works of this type include studies by two American writers, Founding Brothers (2000), an examination of the American Revolution generation by Joseph J. Ellis; and The Metaphysical Club (2001), a group biography of key American intellectual figures at the end of the 1800’s by Louis Menand of the United States.
Modern biographers face some of the same challenges that their predecessors faced. Human behavior is complex, and the opportunity to observe it directly is limited. Today’s biographers, however, generally have better access to a range of research material and a better sense of the psychological motives that govern human behavior. Biographies that reflect a deep concern for the complexities of their subjects are among the most noted and respected in their field. They include Henry James (5 volumes, 1953-1974) by Leon Edel of the United States, Hitler (1973) by Joachim C. Fest of Germany, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974) by Fawn M. Brodie of the United States, Dostoevsky (5 volumes, 1976-2002) by Joseph Frank of the United States, and Leonardo da Vinci (2017) by Walter Isaacson of the United States.
