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biography

Account of a person's life. When it is written by that person, it is an autobiography. Biography may consist simply of the factual details of a person's life told in chronological order, but has generally become a matter of interpretation as well as historical accuracy. Unofficial biographies (not sanctioned by the subject) have frequently led to legal disputes over both interpretation and facts.

History, Europe

Among ancient biographers are the Greek Xenophon and Plutarch, the Roman Tacitus and Suetonius, and the authors of the Gospels of the New Testament. Medieval biography was mostly devoted to religious edification and produced chronicles of saints and martyrs; among secular biographies are Charlemagne by Frankish monk Einhard (c. 770–840), Alfred by Welsh monk Asser (died c. 910), and Petrarch by Boccaccio.

History, UK

In England true biography begins with the early Tudor period and such works as Sir Thomas More (1626), written by William Roper, the son-in-law of the English politician and writer Sir Thomas More. By the 18th century it became a literary form in its own right through the book Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81) by English writer Samuel Johnson and the biography of Johnson by James Boswell biography (1791). Nineteenth-century biographers include English writers Robert Southey, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Henry Lewes, and Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle. The general tendency in biographies of the Victorian period was to provide great detail and suppress the more personal facts. The book Eminent Victorians (1918) by English writer Lytton Strachey opened a new era of frankness in the history of biography.

20th century, USA and UK

Twentieth-century biographers include US academic Richard Ellmann (who wrote on the Irish writers James Joyce and Oscar Wilde), and English writer Elizabeth Longford (who wrote on Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington).

Biographical reference works

The earliest biographical dictionary in the accepted sense was that of French philosopher Pierre Bayle (1696), followed during the 19th century by the development of national biographies in Europe, and the foundation of the English Dictionary of National Biography in 1882 and the Dictionary of American Biography in 1928.

US biography In the USA, notable biographers include William Manchester (John F Kennedy and Douglas MacArthur), Leon Edel (Henry James), and Joseph Lash (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller).

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biography - events

397	Roman Empire	Bishop Augustine begins his Confessions, an autobiograpy that recounts his intellectual and spiritual development.
830	Frankish Kingdom	Einhard, an adviser to the Frankish emperors Charlemagne and Louis I the Pious, retires to Seligenstadt, Franconia, and begins his Vita Karoli Magni/Life of Charlemagne. Modelled on Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars, it presents a lively picture of the emperor's character and achievements.
c. 1436	England	English mystic Margery Kempe completes The Book of Margery Kempe, the earliest ‘autobiography’ in English literature, which was dictated to a scribe as Kempe was illiterate.
1463	Italy	Pope Pius II (Enea Silvius Piccolomini) completes his Commentarii/Commentaries, the first autobiography by a pope and one of the finest autobiographies of the Renaissance.
1811	Germany	The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes the first part of his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit/Poetry and Truth.
1883		The US writer Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens) publishes his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi.
1907		The US historian Henry Brooks Adams privately publishes his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of 20th Century Multiplicity.
1912		The black American poet-historian James Weldon Johnson anonymously publishes The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
1933		The US writer Gertrude Stein publishes The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, her autobiography.
1937	England	The English writer George Orwell publishes The Road to Wigan Pier, an account of his visits to working-class areas in Lancashire, England.
1948	USA, UK	The US monk Thomas Merton publishes Seven Storey Mountain, an autobiography published in Britain as Elected Silence.
1955	France	The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss publishes Tristes Tropiques/Sad Tropics, his intellectual autobiography.
1958	Ireland	The Irish writer Brendan Behan publishes his autobiographical Borstal Boy.

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