Biographies of living persons

For other uses, see Biography (disambiguation).
For the World Heritage Encyclopedia policy on biographies of living persons, see World Heritage Encyclopedia:Biographies of living persons.




History of the form

Classical era


Middle Ages


In the Medieval Islamic Civilization (c. AD 750 to 1258), biographies began to be produced on a large scale, notably with the advent of paper and the beginning of the Prophetic biography tradition. This led to the introduction of a new literary genre: the biographical dictionary. The first biographical dictionaries were written in the Muslim world from the 9th century onwards. They contained more social data for a large segment of the population than that found in any other pre-industrial society. 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]



Romantic era

The romantic biographers disputed many of Johnson's judgments. Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1781–88) exploited the romantic point of view and the confessional mode. The tradition of testimony and confession was brought to the New World by the Puritan and Quaker memoirists and journal-keepers, where the form continued to be influential.

Adaptations in the New World

Generally the American biography followed the English model, while incorporating Thomas Carlyle's view that a 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 the early American biography, the American writers carved out their own 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]

Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (1791) would provide the archetype for the American success story.[6]

18th century

One of the best known biographies, Life of Samuel Johnson" (1791) was written by James Boswell chronicling the life of his friend and companion Dr. Samuel Johnson. The modern Johnsonian critic Harold Bloom has claimed it is the greatest biography written in the English language.

19th century

The distinction between the mass biography and the literary biography had formed by the middle of the nineteenth century, and reflected a breach between high culture and middle-class culture. This division would endure for the remainder of the century. Biography began to flower, thanks to new publishing technologies and an expanding reading public. This revolution in publishing made books available to a larger audience of readers. Almost ten times as many American biographies appeared from 1840 to 1860 than had appeared in the first two decades of the century. In addition, affordable paperback editions of popular biographies were published for the first time. Also, American periodicals began publishing a sequence of biographical sketches.[5] The topical emphasis shifted from republican heroes to self-made men and women.

Much of the late nineteenth-century biographical works remained formulaic. Notably, few autobiographies were written in the nineteenth-century. The following century witnessed a renaissance of autobiography. Beginning with Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery (1901) and followed by Henry Adams' Education (1907), the chronicle of self-defined failure that ran counter to the predominant American success story. The publication of socially significant autobiographies by both men and women began to flourish.[6]

20th century

The authority of psychology and sociology was ascendant, and would make its mark on the new century’s biographies.[6] 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 Americans read and wrote biographies, as a culture of autobiography developed in which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy.[5]

The conventional concept of national heroes and narratives of success disappeared in the obsession with psychological explorations of personality. The new school of biography featured iconoclasts, scientific analysts, and fictional biographers. This wave included Lytton Strachey, Gamaliel Bradford, André Maurois, and Emil Ludwig, among others. Strachey's biographies had an influence similar to that which Samuel Johnson had enjoyed earlier. In the 1920s and '30s, biographical writers sought to capitalize on Strachey's popularity and imitate his style. 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." In 1929, nearly 700 biographies were published in the United States, and the first dictionary of American biography appeared. In the decade that followed, numerous biographies continued to be published, despite the economic depression. They reached a growing audience through inexpensive formats via public libraries.


21st century

With the technological advances of the twenty-first century, multimedia biography became 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 culminated in such cable and satellite television networks as A&E, The Biography Channel, The History Channel, and History International.

More recently, CD-ROM and online biographies have 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 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.[8] General "life writing" techniques are a subject of scholarly study.[9]

Book awards


See also

  • Legal biography




External links
