biography

biography
/buy og"reuh fee, bee-/, n., pl. biographies.
1. a written account of another person's life: the biography of Byron by Marchand.
2. an account in biographical form of an organization, society, theater, animal, etc.
3. such writings collectively.
4. the writing of biography as an occupation or field of endeavor.
[1675-85; < Gk biographía. See BIO-, -GRAPHY]

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Form of nonfictional literature whose subject is the life of an individual.

The earliest biographical writings probably were funeral speeches and inscriptions. The origins of modern biography lie with Plutarch's moralizing lives of prominent Greeks and Romans and Suetonius's gossipy lives of the Caesars. Few biographies of common individuals were written until the 16th century. The major developments of English biography came in the 18th century, with such works as James Boswell's Life of Johnson. In modern times impatience with Victorian reticence and the development of psychoanalysis have sometimes led to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding of biographical subjects. See also autobiography.

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Introduction

      form of literature, commonly considered nonfictional, the subject of which is the life of an individual. One of the oldest forms of literary expression, it seeks to re-create in words the life of a human being—as understood from the historical or personal perspective of the author—by drawing upon all available evidence, including that retained in memory as well as written, oral, and pictorial material.

Aspects

Historical
      Biography is sometimes regarded as a branch of history (historiography), and earlier biographical writings—such as the 15th-century Mémoires of the French councellor of state, Philippe de Commynes, or George Cavendish's 16th-century life of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey—have often been treated as historical material rather than as literary works in their own right. Some entries in ancient Chinese chronicles included biographical sketches; imbedded in the Roman historian Tacitus' Annals is the most famous biography of the emperor Tiberius; conversely, Sir Winston Churchill (Churchill, Sir Winston)'s magnificent life of his ancestor John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, can be read as a history (written from a special point of view) of Britain and much of Europe during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). Yet there is general recognition today that history and biography are quite distinct forms of literature. History usually deals in generalizations about a period of time (for example, the Renaissance), about a group of people in time (the English colonies in North America), about an institution (monasticism during the Middle Ages). Biography more typically focuses upon a single human being and deals in the particulars of that person's life.

      Both biography and history, however, are often concerned with the past, and it is in the hunting down, evaluating, and selection of sources that they are akin. In this sense biography can be regarded as a craft rather than an art: techniques of research and general rules for testing evidence can be learned by anyone and thus need involve comparatively little of that personal commitment associated with art.

      A biographer in pursuit of an individual long dead is usually hampered by a lack of sources: it is often impossible to check or verify what written evidence there is; there are no witnesses to cross-examine. No method has yet been developed by which to overcome such problems. Each life, however, presents its own opportunities as well as specific difficulties to the biographer: the ingenuity with which the biographer handles gaps in the record—by providing information, for example, about the age that casts light upon the subject—has much to do with the quality of the resulting work. James Boswell knew comparatively little about Samuel Johnson's earlier years; it is one of the greatnesses of his Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1791) that he succeeded, without inventing matter or deceiving the reader, in giving the sense of a life progressively unfolding. Another masterpiece of reconstruction in the face of little evidence is A.J.A. Symons (Symons, A.J.A.)' biography of the English author and eccentric Frederick William Rolfe, The Quest for Corvo (1934). A further difficulty is the unreliability of most collections of papers, letters, and other memorabilia edited before the 20th century. Not only did editors feel free to omit and transpose materials, but sometimes the authors of documents revised their personal writings for the benefit of posterity, often falsifying the record and presenting their biographers with a difficult situation when the originals were no longer extant.

      The biographer writing the life of a person recently dead is often faced with the opposite problem: an abundance of living witnesses and a plethora of materials, which include the subject's papers and letters, sometimes transcriptions of telephone conversations and conferences, as well as the record of interviews granted to the biographer by the subject's friends and associates. Frank Friedel, for example, in creating a biography of the U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, had to wrestle with something like 40 tons of paper. But finally, when writing the life of any person, whether long or recently dead, the biographer's chief responsibility is vigorously to test the authenticity of the collected materials by whatever rules and techniques are available. When the subject of a biography is still alive and a contributor to the work, the biographer's task is to examine the subject's perspective against multiple, even contradictory sources.

Psychological
      Assembling a string of facts in chronological order does not constitute the life of a person; it only gives an outline of events. The biographer therefore seeks to elicit from his materials the motives for his subject's actions and to discover the shape of his personality. The biographer who has known his subject in life enjoys the advantage of his own direct impressions, often fortified by what the subject has himself revealed in conversations, and of his having lived in the same era (thus avoiding the pitfalls in depicting distant centuries). But on the debit side, such a biographer's view is coloured by the emotional factor almost inevitably present in a living association. Conversely, the biographer who knows his subject only from written evidence, and perhaps from the report of witnesses, lacks the insight generated by a personal relationship but can generally command a greater objectivity in his effort to probe his subject's inner life.

      Biographers of the 20th century have had at their disposal the psychological theories and practice (Freudian criticism) of Sigmund Freud (Freud, Sigmund) and of his followers and rivals. The extent to which these new biographical tools for the unlocking of personality have been employed and the results of their use have varied greatly. On the one hand, some biographers have deployed upon their pages the apparatus of psychological revelation—analysis of behaviour symbols, interpretation based on the Oedipus complex, detection of Jungian archetypal patterns of behaviour, and the like. Other biographers, usually the authors of scholarly large-scale lives, have continued to ignore the psychological method; while still others, though avoiding explicit psychological analysis and terminology, have nonetheless presented aspects of their subjects' behaviours in such a way as to suggest psychological interpretations. In general, the movement, since World War I, has been toward a discreet use of the psychological method, from Katherine Anthony (Anthony, Katharine)'s Margaret Fuller (1920) and Joseph Wood Krutch (Krutch, Joseph Wood)'s study of Edgar Allan Poe (1926), which enthusiastically embrace such techniques, through Erik Erikson (Erikson, Erik H.)'s Young Man Luther (1958) and Gandhi's Truth on the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969), where they are adroitly and sagaciously used by a biographer who is himself a psychiatrist, to Leon Edel (Edel, Leon)'s vast biography of Henry James (5 vol., 1953–72), where they are used with sophistication by a man of letters. The science of psychology has also begun to affect the biographer's very approach to his subject: a number of 20th-century authors seek to explore their own involvement with the person they are writing about before embarking upon the life itself.

Ethical
      The biographer, particularly the biographer of a contemporary, is often confronted with an ethical problem: how much of the truth, as he has been able to ascertain it, should be printed? Since the inception of biographical criticism in the later 18th century, this somewhat arid—because unanswerable—question has dominated both literary and popular discussion of biographical literature. Upon the publication of the Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell was bitterly accused of slandering his celebrated subject. More than a century and a half later, Lord Moran's Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (1966), in which Lord Moran used the Boswellian techniques of reproducing conversations from his immediate notes and jottings, was attacked in much the same terms (though the question was complicated by Lord Moran's confidential position as Churchill's physician). In the United States, William Manchester's Death of a President (1967), on John F. Kennedy, created an even greater stir in the popular press. There the issue is usually presented as “the public's right to know”; but for the biographer it is a problem of his obligation to preserve historical truth as measured against the personal anguish he may inflict on others in doing so. Since no standard of “biographical morality” has ever been agreed upon—Boswell, Lord Moran, and Manchester have all, for example, had eloquent defenders—the individual biographer must steer his own course. That course in the 20th century is sometimes complicated by the refusal of the custodians of the papers of important persons, particularly national political figures, to provide access to all the documents.

Aesthetic
      Biography, while related to history in its search for facts and its responsibility to truth, is truly a branch of literature because it seeks to elicit from facts, by selection and design, the illusion of a life actually being lived. Within the bounds of given data, the biographer seeks to transform plain information into illumination. If he invents or suppresses material in order to create an effect, he fails truth; if he is content to recount facts, he fails art. This tension, between the requirements of authenticity and the necessity for an imaginative ordering of materials to achieve lifelikeness, is perhaps best exemplified in the biographical problem of time. On the one hand, the biographer seeks to portray the unfolding of a life with all its cross-currents of interests, changing emotional states, events; yet in order to avoid reproducing the confusion and clutter of actual daily existence, he must interrupt the flow of diurnal time and group his materials so as to reveal traits of personality, grand themes of experience, and the actions and attitudes leading to moments of high decision. His achievement as a biographical artist will be measured, in great part, by his ability to suggest the sweep of chronology and yet to highlight the major patterns of behaviour that give a life its shape and meaning.

Kinds
      Biographies are difficult to classify. It is easily recognizable that there are many kinds of lifewriting, but one kind can easily shade into another; no standard basis for classification has yet been developed. A fundamental division offers, however, a useful preliminary view: biographies written from personal knowledge of the subject and those written from research.

Firsthand knowledge
      The biography that results from what might be called a vital relationship between the biographer and his subject often represents a conjunction of two main biographical forces: a desire on the part of the writer to preserve “the earthly pilgrimage of a man,” as the 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle (Carlyle, Thomas) calls it (Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 1838), and an awareness that he has the special qualifications, because of direct observation and access to personal papers, to undertake such a task. This kind of biography is, in one form or another, to be found in most of the cultures that preserve any kind of written biographical tradition, and it is commonly to be found in all ages from the earliest literatures to the present. In its first manifestations, it was often produced by, or based upon the recollections (scripture) of, the disciples of a religious figure—such as the biographical fragments concerning Buddha, portions of the Old Testament, and the Christian gospels. It is sometimes called “source biography” because it preserves original materials, the testimony of the biographer, and often intimate papers of the subject (which have proved invaluable for later biographers and historians—as exemplified by Einhard's 9th-century Vita Karoli imperatoris [“Life of Charlemagne”] or Thomas Moore (Moore, Thomas)'s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron [1830]). Biography based on a living relationship has produced a wealth of masterpieces: Tacitus' life of his father-in-law in the Agricola, William Roper's life of his father-in-law Sir Thomas More (1626), John Gibson Lockhart (Lockhart, John Gibson)'s biography (1837–38) of his father-in-law Sir Walter Scott, Johann Peter Eckermann (Eckermann, Johann Peter)'s Conversations with Goethe (1836; trans. 1839), and Ernest Jones's Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953–57). Indeed, what is generally acknowledged as the greatest biography ever written belongs to this class: James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.

Research
      Biographies that are the result of research rather than firsthand knowledge present a rather bewildering array of forms. First, however, there should be mentioned two special kinds of biographical activity.

Reference collections
      Since the late 18th century, the Western world—and, in the 20th century, the rest of the world as well—has produced increasing numbers of compilations of biographical facts concerning both the living and the dead. These collections stand apart from literature. Many nations have multivolume biographical dictionaries such as the Dictionary of National Biography in Britain and the Dictionary of American Biography in the United States; general encyclopaedias contain extensive information about figures of world importance; classified collections such as Lives of the Lord Chancellors (Britain) and biographical manuals devoted to scholars, scientists, and other groups are available in growing numbers; information about living persons is gathered into such national collections as Who's Who? (Who's Who) (Britain), Chi è? (Italy), and Who's Who in America?

Character sketches (literary sketch)
      The short life, however, is a genuine current in the mainstream of biographical literature and is represented in many ages and cultures. Excluding early quasi-biographical materials about religious or political figures, the short biography first appeared in China (Chinese literature) at about the end of the 2nd century BC, and two centuries later it was a fully developed literary form in the Roman Empire. The Shiji (“Historical Records”), by Sima Qian (145?–c. 85 BC), include lively biographical sketches, very short and anecdotal with plentiful dialogue, grouped by character-occupation types such as “maligned statesmen,” “rash generals,” “assassins,” a method that became established tradition with the Hanshu (History of the Former Han Dynasty), by Sima Qian's successor and imitator, Pan Gu (Ban Gu) (AD 32–92). Toward the end of the first century AD, in the Mediterranean world, Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, which are contrasting pairs of biographies, one Greek and one Roman (Latin literature), appeared; there followed within a brief span of years the Lives of the Caesars, by the Roman emperor Hadrian's librarian Suetonius. These works established a quite subtle mingling of character sketch with chronological narrative that has ever since been the dominant mark of this genre. Plutarch, from an ethical standpoint emphasizing the political virtues of man as governor, and Suetonius, from the promptings of sheer biographical curiosity, develop their subjects with telling details of speech and action; and though Plutarch, generally considered to be the superior artist, has greatly influenced other arts than biographical literature—witness Shakespeare's Roman plays, which are based on his Lives—Suetonius created in the Life of Nero one of the supreme examples of the form. Islamic literature, from the 10th century, produced short “typed” biographies based on occupation—saints, scholars, and the like—or on arbitrarily chosen personal characteristics. The series of brief biographies has continued to the present day with such representative collections as, in the Renaissance, Giorgio Vasari (Vasari, Giorgio)'s Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Thomas Fuller (Fuller, Thomas)'s History of the Worthies of England in the 17th century, Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets in the 18th, and, in more recent times, the “psychographs” of the American Gamaliel Bradford (Bradford, Gamaliel) (Damaged Souls, 1923), Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) and the “profiles” that have become a hallmark of the weekly magazine The New Yorker (New Yorker, The).

      Further classification of biographies compiled by research can be achieved by regarding the comparative objectivity of approach. For convenience, six categories, blending one into the other in infinite gradations and stretching from the most objective to the most subjective, can be employed.

Informative biography
      This, the first category, is the most objective and is sometimes called “accumulative” biography. The author of such a work, avoiding all forms of interpretation except selection—for selection, even in the most comprehensive accumulation, is inevitable—seeks to unfold a life by presenting, usually in chronological order, the paper remains, the evidences, relating to that life. This biographer takes no risks but, in turn, seldom wins much critical acclaim: his work is likely to become a prime source for biographers who follow him. During the 19th century, the Life of Milton: Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time (7 vol., 1859–94), by David Masson, and Abraham Lincoln: A History (10 vol., 1890), by John G. Nicolay and John Hay (Hay, John), offer representative samples. In the 20th century such works as Edward Nehls's, D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (1957–59) and David Alec Wilson's collection of the life records of Thomas Carlyle (1923–29), in six volumes, continue the traditions of this kind of life writing.

Critical biography
      This second category, scholarly and critical, unlike the first, does offer a genuine presentation of a life. These works are very carefully researched; sources and “justifications” (as the French call them) are scrupulously set forth in notes, appendixes, bibliographies; inference and conjecture, when used, are duly labelled as such; no fictional devices or manipulations of material are permitted, and the life is generally developed in straight chronological order. Yet such biography, though not taking great risks, does employ the arts of selection and arrangement. The densest of these works, completely dominated by fact, have small appeal except to the specialist. Those written with the greatest skill and insight are in the first rank of modern life writing. In these scholarly biographies—the “life and times” or the minutely detailed life—the author is able to deploy an enormous weight of matter and yet convey the sense of a personality in action, as exemplified in Leslie Marchand's Byron (1957), with some 1,200 pages of text and 300 pages of notes, Dumas Malone's Jefferson and his Time (4 vol., 1948–70), Churchill's Marlborough (1933–38), Douglas S. Freeman's George Washington (1948–57). The critical biography aims at evaluating the works as well as unfolding the life of its subject, either by interweaving the life in its consideration of the works or else by devoting separate chapters to the works. Critical biography has had its share of failures: except in skillful hands, criticism clumsily intrudes upon the continuity of a life, or the works of the subject are made to yield doubtful interpretations of character, particularly in the case of literary figures. It has to its credit, however, such fine biographies as Arthur S. Link, Wilson (5 vol., 1947–65); Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959); Ernest Jones, The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud; Douglas S. Freeman, Lee (1934–35); and Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens (1952).

“Standard” biography
      This third, and central, category of biography, balanced between the objective and the subjective, represents the mainstream of biographical literature, the practice of biography as an art. From antiquity until the present—within the limits of the psychological awareness of the particular age and the availability of materials—this kind of biographical literature has had as its objective what Sir Edmund Gosse called “the faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures through life.” It seeks to transform, by literary methods that do not distort or falsify, the truthful record of fact into the truthful effect of a life being lived. Such biography ranges in style and method from George Cavendish's 16th-century life of Cardinal Wolsey, Roger North's late-17th-century lives of his three brothers, and Boswell's life of Johnson to modern works like Lord David Cecil's Melbourne, Garrett Mattingly's Catherine of Aragon, Andrew Turnbull's Scott Fitzgerald, and Leon Edel's Henry James.

Interpretative biography
      This fourth category of life writing is subjective and has no standard identity. At its best it is represented by the earlier works of Catherine Drinker Bowen (Bowen, Catherine), particularly her lives of Tchaikovsky, “Beloved Friend” (1937), and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Yankee from Olympus (1944). She molds her sources into a vivid narrative, worked up into dramatic scenes that always have some warranty of documentation—the dialogue, for example, is sometimes devised from the indirect discourse of letter or diary. She does not invent materials; but she quite freely manipulates them—that is to say, interprets them—according to the promptings of insight, derived from arduous research, and with the aim of unfolding her subject's life as vividly as possible. (Mrs. Bowen, much more conservative in her later works, clearly demonstrates the essential distance between the third and fourth categories: her distinguished life of Sir Edward Coke, The Lion and the Throne [1957], foregoes manipulation and the “recreation” of dialogue and limits interpretation to the artful deployment of biographical resources.) Very many interpretative biographies stop just short of fictionalizing in the freedom with which they exploit materials. The works of Frank Harris (Harris, Frank) (Oscar Wilde, 1916) and Hesketh Pearson (Pearson, Hesketh) (Tom Paine, Friend of Mankind, 1937; Beerbohm Tree, 1956) demonstrate this kind of biographical latitude.

Fictionalized biography
      The books in this fifth category belong to biographical literature only by courtesy. Materials are freely invented, scenes and conversations are imagined; unlike the previous category, this class often depends almost entirely upon secondary sources and cursory research. Its authors, well represented on the paperback shelves, have created a hybrid form designed to mate the appeal of the novel with a vague claim to authenticity. This form is exemplified by writers such as Irving Stone (Stone, Irving), in his Lust for Life (on van Gogh) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (on Michelangelo). Whereas the compiler of biographical information (the first category) risks no involvement, the fictionalizer admits no limit to it.

fiction presented as biography
      The sixth and final category is outright fiction, the novel (historical novel) written as biography or autobiography. It has enjoyed brilliant successes. Such works do not masquerade as lives; rather, they imaginatively take the place of biography where perhaps there can be no genuine life writing for lack of materials. Among the most highly regarded examples of this genre are, in the guise of autobiography, Robert Graves (Graves, Robert)'s books on the Roman emperor Claudius, I, Claudius and Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina; Mary Renault (Renault, Mary)'s The King Must Die on the legendary hero Theseus; and Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. The diary form of autobiography was amusingly used by George (Grossmith, George) and Weedon Grossmith to tell the trials and tribulations of their fictional character Charles Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody (1892). In the form of biography this category includes Graves's Count Belisarius and Hope Muntz's Golden Warrior (on Harold II, vanquished at the Battle of Hastings, 1066). Some novels-as-biography, using fictional names, are designed to evoke rather than re-create an actual life, such as W. Somerset Maugham (Maugham, W. Somerset)'s Moon and Sixpence (Gauguin) and Cakes and Ale (Thomas Hardy) and Robert Penn Warren (Warren, Robert Penn)'s All the King's Men (Huey Long).

“Special-purpose” biography
      In addition to these six main categories, there exists a large class of works that might be denominated “special-purpose” biography. In these works the art of biography has become the servant of other interests. They include potboilers (written as propaganda or as a scandalous exposé) and “as-told-to” narratives (often popular in newspapers) designed to publicize a celebrity. This category includes also “campaign biographies” aimed at forwarding the cause of a political candidate (Nathaniel Hawthorne (Hawthorne, Nathaniel)'s Life of Franklin Pierce [1852] being an early example); the weighty commemorative volume, not infrequently commissioned by the widow (which, particularly in Victorian times, has usually enshrouded the subject in monotonous eulogy); and pious works that are properly called hagiography, or lives of holy men, written to edify the reader.

      Autobiography, like biography, manifests a wide variety of forms, beginning with the intimate writings made during a life that were not intended (or apparently not intended) for publication. Whatever its form or time, however, autobiography has helped define a nation's citizens and political ambitions. The form is crucial to not only how an individual meets the challenge of stating “I am” but how a nation and a historical period do so.

Letters, diaries (diary), and journals
      Broadly speaking, the order of this category represents a scale of increasingly self-conscious revelation. Collected letters, especially in carefully edited modern editions such as W.S. Lewis' of the correspondences of the 18th-century man of letters Horace Walpole (34 vol., 1937–65), can offer a rewarding though not always predictable experience: some eminent people commit little of themselves to paper, while other lesser figures pungently re-create themselves and their world. The 15th-century Paston Letters constitute an invaluable chronicle of the web of daily life woven by a tough and vigorous English family among the East Anglian gentry during the Wars of the Roses; the composer Mozart and the poet Byron, in quite different ways, are among the most revealing of letter writers. Diarists have made great names for themselves out of what seems a humble branch of literature. To mention only two, in the 20th century the young Jewish girl Anne Frank (Frank, Anne) created such an impact by her recording of narrow but intense experience that her words were translated to stage and screen; while a comparatively minor figure of 17th-century England, Samuel Pepys (Pepys, Samuel)—he was secretary to the navy—has immortalized himself in a diary that exemplifies the chief qualifications for this kind of writing—candour, zest, and an unselfconscious enjoyment of self. The somewhat more formal journal is likewise represented by a variety of masterpieces, from the notebooks, which reveal the teeming, ardent brain of Leonardo da Vinci, and William Wordsworth's sister Dorothy (Wordsworth, Dorothy)'s sensitive recording of experience in her Journals (1897), to French foreign minister Armand de Caulaincourt (Caulaincourt, Armand, marquis de, Duc De Vicence)'s recounting of his flight from Russia with Napoleon (translated as With Napoleon in Russia, 1935) and the Journals of the brothers Goncourt, which present a confidential history of the literary life of mid-19th-century Paris.

Memoirs (memoir) and reminiscences
      These are autobiographies that usually emphasize what is remembered rather than who is remembering; the author, instead of recounting his life, deals with those experiences of his life, people, and events that he considers most significant. (The extreme contrast to memoirs is the spiritual autobiography, so concentrated on the life of the soul that the author's outward life and its events remains a blur. The artless res gestae, a chronology of events, occupies the middle ground.)

      In the 15th century, Philippe de Commynes (Commynes, Philippe de), modestly effacing himself except to authenticate a scene by his presence, presents in his Mémoires a life of Louis XI, master of statecraft, as witnessed by one of the most sagacious counsellors of the age. The memoirs of Giacomo Casanova (Casanova, Giovanni Giacomo) boast of an 18th-century rake's adventures; those of Hector Berlioz (Berlioz, Hector) explore with great brilliance the trials of a great composer, the reaches of an extraordinary personality, and the musical life of Europe in the first part of the 19th century. The memoir form is eminently represented in modern times by Sir Osbert Sitwell (Sitwell, Sir Osbert, 5th Baronet)'s polished volumes, presenting a tapestry of recollections that, as has been observed, “tells us little about what it feels like to be in Sir Osbert's skin”—a phrase perfectly illustrating the difference between memoirs and formal autobiography.

Formal autobiography
      This category offers a special kind of biographical truth: a life, reshaped by recollection, with all of recollection's conscious and unconscious omissions and distortions. The novelist Graham Greene (Greene, Graham) says that, for this reason, an autobiography is only “a sort of life” and uses the phrase as the title for his own autobiography (1971). Any such work is a true picture of what, at one moment in a life, the subject wished—or is impelled—to reveal of that life. An event recorded in the autobiographer's youthful journal is likely to be somewhat different from that same event recollected in later years. Memory being plastic, the autobiographer regenerates materials as they are being used. The advantage of possessing unique and private information, accessible to no researching biographer, is counterbalanced by the difficulty of establishing a stance that is neither overmodest nor aggressively self-assertive. The historian Edward Gibbon (Gibbon, Edward) declares, “. . . I must be conscious that no one is so well qualified as myself to describe the service of my thoughts and actions.” The 17th-century English poet Abraham Cowley (Cowley, Abraham) provides a rejoinder: “It is a hard and nice subject for a man to write of himself; it grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement and the reader's ears to hear anything of praise from him.”

      There are but few and scattered examples of autobiographical literature in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the 2nd century BC the Chinese classical historian Sima Qian included a brief account of himself in the Shiji (“Historical Records”). It is stretching a point to include, from the 1st century BC, the letters of Cicero (or, in the early Christian era, the letters of St. Paul); and Julius Caesar (Caesar, Julius)'s Commentaries tell little about Caesar, though they present a masterly picture of the conquest of Gaul and the operations of the Roman military machine at its most efficient. The Confessions of St. Augustine, of the 5th century AD, belong to a special category of autobiography; the 14th-century Letter to Posterity of the Italian poet Petrarch is but a brief excursion in the field.

      Speaking generally, then, it can be said that autobiography begins with the Renaissance in the 15th century; the first example was written not in Italy but in England by a woman entirely untouched by the “new learning” or literature. In her old age the mystic Margery Kempe (Kempe, Margery) of Lynn in Norfolk dictated an account of her bustling, far-faring life, which, however concerned with religious experience, racily reveals her somewhat abrasive personality and the impact she made upon her fellows. This is done in a series of scenes, mainly developed by dialogue. Though calling herself, in abject humility, “the creature,” Kempe knew, and has effectively transmitted the proof, that she was a remarkable person.

      The first full-scale formal autobiography was written a generation later by a celebrated humanist publicist of the age, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, after he was elevated to the papacy, in 1458, as Pius II—the result of an election that he recounts with astonishing frankness spiced with malice. In the first book of his autobiography—misleadingly named Commentarii, in evident imitation of Caesar—Pius II traces his career up to becoming pope; the succeeding 11 books (and a fragment of a 12th, which breaks off a few months before his death in 1464) present a panorama of the age, with its cruel and cultivated Italian (Italian literature) tyrants, cynical condottieri (professional soldiers), recalcitrant kings, the politics and personalities behind the doors of the Vatican, and the urbane but exuberant character of the Pope himself. Pius II exploits the plasticity of biographical art by creating opportunities—especially when writing of himself as the connoisseur of natural beauties and antiquities—for effective autobiographical narration. His “Commentaries” show the art of formal autobiography in full bloom in its beginnings; they rank as one of its half dozen greatest exemplars.

      The neglected autobiography of the Italian physician and astrologer Gironimo Cardano (Cardano, Girolamo), a work of great charm, and the celebrated adventures of the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini (Cellini, Benvenuto) in Italy of the 16th century; the uninhibited autobiography of the English historian and diplomat Lord Herbert of Cherbury (Herbert, Edward Herbert, 1st Baron), in the early 17th; and Colley Cibber (Cibber, Colley)'s Apology for The Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian in the early 18th—these are representative examples of biographical literature from the Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment. The latter period itself produced three works that are especially notable for their very different reflections of the spirit of the times as well as of the personalities of their authors: the urbane autobiography of Edward Gibbon, the great historian; the plainspoken, vigorous success story of an American who possessed all the talents, Benjamin Franklin (Franklin, Benjamin); and the somewhat morbid introspection of a revolutionary Swiss-French political and social theorist, the Confessions of J.-J. Rousseau (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques)—the latter leading to two autobiographical explorations in poetry during the Romantic Movement (Romanticism) in England, Wordsworth's Prelude and Byron's Childe Harold, cantos III and IV. Significantly, it is at the end of the 18th century that the word autobiography apparently first appears in print, in The Monthly Review, 1797.

Specialized forms of autobiography
      These might roughly be grouped under four heads: thematic, religious, intellectual, and fictionalized. The first grouping includes books with such diverse purposes as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1924), The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920), and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). Religious autobiography claims a number of great works, ranging from the Confessions of St. Augustine and Peter Abelard's Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes) in the Middle Ages to the autobiographical chapters of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (“The Everlasting No,” “Centre of Indifference,” “The Everlasting Yea”) and Cardinal John Newman's beautifully wrought Apologia in the 19th century. That century and the early 20th saw the creation of several intellectual autobiographies. The Autobiography of the philosopher John S. Mill (Mill, John Stuart), severely analytical, concentrates upon “an education which was unusual and remarkable.” It is paralleled, across the Atlantic, in the bleak but astringent quest of The Education of Henry Adams (printed privately 1906; published 1918). Edmund Gosse (Gosse, Sir Edmund)'s sensitive study of the difficult relationship between himself and his Victorian father, Father and Son (1907), and George Moore (Moore, George)'s quasi-novelized crusade in favour of Irish art, Hail and Farewell (1911–14), illustrate the variations of intellectual autobiography. Finally, somewhat analogous to the novel as biography (for example, Graves's I, Claudius) is the autobiography thinly disguised as, or transformed into, the novel. This group includes such works as Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh (1903), James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), George Santayana's Last Puritan (1935), and the gargantuan novels of Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel [1929], Of Time and the River [1935]).

Historical development

Western literature
      In the Western world, biographical literature can be said to begin in the 5th century BC with the poet Ion of Chios, who wrote brief sketches of such famous contemporaries as Pericles and Sophocles. It continued throughout the classical period for a thousand years, until the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. Broadly speaking, the first half of this period exhibits a considerable amount of biographical activity, of which much has been lost; such fragments as remain of the rest—largely funeral elegies and rhetorical exercises depicting ideal types of character or behaviour—suggest that from a literary point of view the loss is not grievous. (An exception is the life of the Roman art patron Pomponius Atticus, written in the 1st century BC by Cornelius Nepos.) Biographical works of the last centuries in the classical period, characterized by numerous sycophantic accounts of emperors, share the declining energies of the other literary arts. But although there are few genuine examples of life writing, in the modern sense of the term, those few are masterpieces. The two greatest teachers of the classical Mediterranean world, Socrates and Jesus Christ, both prompted the creation of magnificent biographies written by their followers. To what extent Plato's life of Socrates keeps to strict biographical truth cannot now be ascertained (though the account of Socrates given by Plato's contemporary the soldier Xenophon, in his Memorabilia, suggests a reasonable faithfulness) and he does not offer a full-scale biography. Yet in his two consummate biographical dialogues—The Apology (recounting the trial and condemnation of Socrates) and the Phaedo (a portrayal of Socrates' last hours and death)—he brilliantly re-creates the response of an extraordinary character to the crisis of existence. Some 400 years later there came into being four lives of Jesus, the profound religious significance of which has inevitably obscured their originality—their homely detail, anecdotes, and dialogue that, though didactic in purpose, also evoke a time and a personality. The same century, the first of the Christian era, gave birth to the three first truly “professional” biographers—Plutarch and Suetonius (discussed above) and the historian Tacitus, whose finely wrought biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, concentrating on the administration rather than the man, has something of the monumental quality of Roman architecture. The revolution in thought and attitude brought about by the growth of Christianity is signalled in a specialized autobiography, the Confessions of St. Augustine; but the biographical opportunity suggested by Christian emphasis on the individual soul was, oddly, not to be realized. If the blood of the martyrs fertilized the seed of the new faith, it did not promote the art of biography. The demands of the church and the spiritual needs of men, in a twilight world of superstition and violence, transformed biography into hagiography. There followed a thousand years of saints' lives: the art of biography forced to serve ends other than its own.

      This was a period of biographical darkness, an age dominated by the priest and the knight. The priest shaped biography into an exemplum of other-worldliness, while the knight found escape from daily brutishness in allegory, chivalric romances, and broad satire (the fabliaux). Nevertheless, glimmerings can be seen. A few of the saints' lives, like Eadmer (Edmer)'s Life of Anselm, contain anecdotal materials that give some human flavour to their subjects; the 13th-century French nobleman Jean, sire de Joinville (Joinville, Jean, sire de)'s life of St. Louis (Louis IX of France), Mémoires, offers some lively scenes. The three most interesting biographical manifestations came early. Bishop Gregory of Tours (Gregory of Tours, Saint)' History of the Franks depicts artlessly but vividly, from firsthand observation, the lives and personalities of the four grandsons of Clovis and their fierce queens in Merovingian Gaul of the 6th century. Bede (Bede the Venerable, Saint)'s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, of the 8th century, though lacking the immediacy and exuberance—and the violent protagonists—of Gregory, presents some valuable portraits, like those of “the little dark man,” Paulinus, who converted the King of Northumbria to Christianity.

      Most remarkable, however, a self-consciously wrought work of biography came into being in the 9th century: this was The Life of Charlemagne, written by a cleric at his court named Einhard. He is aware of his biographical obligations and sets forth his point of view and his motives:

I have been careful not to omit any facts that could come to my knowledge, but at the same time not to offend by a prolix style those minds that despise everything modern . . . . No man can write with more accuracy than I of events that took place about me, and of facts concerning which I had personal knowledge. . . .

      He composes the work in order to ensure that Charlemagne's life is not “wrapped in the darkness of oblivion” and out of gratitude for “the care that King Charles bestowed upon me in my childhood, and my constant friendship with himself and his children.” Though Einhard's biography, by modern standards, lacks sustained development, it skillfully reveals the chief patterns of Charlemagne's character—his constancy of aims, powers of persuasion, passion for education. Einhard's work is far closer to modern biography than the rudimentary poetry and drama of his age are to their modern counterparts.

      Like the other arts, biography stirs into fresh life with the Renaissance in the 15th century. Its most significant examples were autobiographical, as has already been mentioned. Biography was chiefly limited to uninspired panegyrics of Italian princes by their court humanists, such as Simonetta's life of the great condottiere, Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan.

      During the first part of the 16th century in England, now stimulated by the “new learning” of Erasmus, John Colet, Thomas More (More, Sir Thomas), and others, there were written three works that can be regarded as the initiators of modern biography: More's History of Richard III, William Roper's Mirrour of Vertue in Worldly Greatness; or, the life of Syr Thomas More, and George Cavendish (Cavendish, George)'s Life of Cardinal Wolsey. The History of Richard III (written about 1513 in both an English and a Latin version) unfortunately remains unfinished; and it cannot meet the strict standards of biographical truth since, under the influence of classical historians, a third of the book consists of dialogue that is not recorded from life. However, it is a brilliant work, exuberant of wit and irony, that not only constitutes a biographical landmark but is also the first piece of modern English prose. With relish, More thus sketches Richard's character:

He was close and secret, a deep dissembler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable where he inwardly hated, not hesitating to kiss whom he thought to kill.

      Worked up into dramatic scenes, this biography, as reproduced in the Chronicles of Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed, later provided both source and inspiration for Shakespeare's rousing melodramatic tragedy, Richard III. The lives written by Roper and Cavendish display interesting links, though the two men were not acquainted: they deal with successive first ministers destroyed by that brutal master of politics, Henry VIII; they are written from first hand observation of their subjects by, respectively, a son-in-law and a household officer; and they exemplify, though never preach, a typically Renaissance theme: Indignatio principis mors est—“the Prince's anger is death.” Roper's work is shorter, more intimate, and simpler; in a series of moving moments it unfolds the struggle within Sir Thomas More between his duty to conscience and his duty to his king. Cavendish offers a more artful and richly developed narrative, beautifully balanced between splendid scenes of Wolsey's glory and vanity and ironically contrasting scenes of disgrace, abasement, and painfully achieved self-knowledge.

      The remaining period of the Renaissance, however, is disappointingly barren. In Russia, where medieval saints' lives had also been produced, there appears a modest biographical manifestation in the Stepennaya Kniga (“Book of Degrees,” 1563), a collection of brief lives of princes and prelates. Somewhat similarly, in France, which was torn by religious strife, Pierre Brantôme (Brantôme, Pierre de) wrote his Lives of Famous Ladies and Lives of Famous Men. The Elizabethan Age in England, for all its magnificent flowering of the drama, poetry, and prose, did not give birth to a single biography worthy of the name. Sir Fulke Greville (Greville, Fulke, 1st Baron Brooke)'s account of Sir Philip Sidney (1652) is marred by tedious moralizing; Francis Bacon (Bacon, Francis, Viscount Saint Alban (or Albans), Baron of Verulam)'s accomplished life of the first Tudor monarch, The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (1622), turns out to be mainly a history of the reign. But Sir Walter Raleigh (Raleigh, Sir Walter) suggests an explanation for this lack of biographical expression in the introduction to his History of the World (1614): “Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth”—as Sir John Hayward could testify, having been imprisoned in the Tower of London because his account (1599) of Richard II's deposition, two centuries earlier, had aroused Queen Elizabeth's anger.

17th and 18th centuries
      In the 17th century the word biography was first employed to create a separate identity for this type of writing. That century and the first half of the 18th presents a busy and sometimes bizarre biographical landscape. It was an era of experimentation and preparation rather than of successful achievement. In the New World, the American Colonies began to develop a scattered biographical activity, none of it of lasting importance. France (French literature) offers the celebrated Letters of the Marquise de Sévigné (Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de) to her daughter, an intimate history of the Age of Louis XIV; numerous memoirs, such as those of Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, and the acerbic ones of the Cardinal de Retz (1717); and the philosopher and critic Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), which was followed by specialized biographical collections and reference works. England saw an outpouring, beginning in the earlier 17th century, of Theophrastan “characters (character writer)” (imaginary types imitated from the work of Theophrastus, a follower of Aristotle), journals, diaries, the disorganized but vivid jottings of John Aubrey (Aubrey, John) (later published in 1898 as Brief Lives); and in the earlier 18th century there were printed all manner of sensational exposés, biographical sketches of famous criminals, and the like. In this era women appear for the first time as biographers. Lady Fanshawe wrote a life of her ambassador-husband (1829); Lucy Hutchinson, one of her Puritan warrior-husbands (written after 1664, published 1806); and Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, produced a warm, bustling life—still good reading today—of her duke, an amiable mediocrity (The Life of the thrice Noble Prince William Cavendishe, Duke Marquess, and Earl of Newcastle, 1667). This age likewise witnessed the first approach to a professional biographer, the noted lover of angling, Izaak Walton (Walton, Izaak), whose five lives (of the poets John Donne [1640] and George Herbert [1670], the diplomat Sir Henry Wotton [1651], and the ecclesiastics Richard Hooker [1665] and Robert Sanderson [1678]) tend to endow their diverse subjects with something of Walton's own genteel whimsicality but nonetheless create skillful biographical portraits. The masterpieces of the age are unquestionably Roger North (North, Roger)'s biographies (not published until 1742, 1744) of his three brothers: Francis, the lord chief justice, “my best brother”; the lively merchant-adventurer Sir Dudley, his favourite; and the neurotic scholar John. Also the author of an autobiography, Roger North likewise produced, as a preface to his life of Francis, the first extensive critical essay on biography, which anticipates some of the ideas of Samuel Johnson (Johnson, Samuel) and James Boswell (Boswell, James).

      The last half of the 18th century witnessed the remarkable conjunction of these two remarkable men, from which sprang what is generally agreed to be the world's supreme biography, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1791). Dr. Johnson, literary dictator of his age, critic and lexicographer who turned his hand to many kinds of literature, himself created the first English professional biographies in The Lives of the English Poets. In essays and in conversation, Johnson set forth principles for biographical composition: the writer must tell the truth—“the business of the biographer is often to . . . display the minute details of daily life,” for it is these details that re-create a living character; and men need not be of exalted fame to provide worthy subjects.

      For more than one reason the somewhat disreputable and incredibly diligent Scots lawyer James Boswell can be called the unique genius of biographical literature, bestriding both autobiography and biography. Early in his acquaintance with Johnson he was advised by the Doctor “to keep a journal of my [Boswell's] life, full and unreserved.” Boswell followed this advice to the letter. His gigantic journals offer an unrivalled self-revelation of a fascinatingly checkered character and career—whether as a young rake in London or thrusting himself upon the aged Rousseau or making his way to Voltaire's seclusion at Ferney in Switzerland with the aim of converting that celebrated skeptic to Christianity. Boswell actively helped to stage the life of Johnson that he knew he was going to write—drawing out Johnson in conversation, setting up scenes he thought likely to yield rich returns—and thus, at moments, he achieved something like the novelist's power over his materials, being himself an active part of what he was to re-create. Finally, though he invented no new biographical techniques, in his Life of Samuel Johnson he interwove with consummate skill Johnson's letters and personal papers, Johnson's conversation as assiduously recorded by the biographer, material drawn from interviews with large numbers of people who knew Johnson, and his own observation of Johnson's behaviour, to elicit the living texture of a life and a personality. Boswell makes good his promise that Johnson “will be seen as he really was . . . .” The influence of Boswell's work penetrated throughout the world and, despite the development of new attitudes in biographical literature, has persisted to this day as a pervasive force. Perhaps equally important to life writers has been the inspiration provided by the recognition accorded Boswell's Life as a major work of literary art. Since World War II there have often been years, in the United States, when the annual bibliographies reveal that more books or articles were published about Johnson and Boswell than about all the rest of biographical literature together.

19th century
      The Life of Johnson may be regarded as a representative psychological expression of the Age of Enlightenment, and it certainly epitomizes several typical characteristics of that age: devotion to urban life, confidence in common sense, emphasis on man as a social being. Yet in its extravagant pursuit of the life of one individual, in its laying bare the eccentricities and suggesting the inner turmoil of personality, it may be thought of as part of that revolution in self-awareness, ideas, aspirations, exemplified in Rousseau's Confessions, the French Revolution, the philosophical writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the political tracts of Thomas Paine, and the works of such early Romantic poets as Robert Burns, William Blake, Wordsworth—a revolution that in its concern with the individual psyche and the freedom of man seemed to augur well for biographical literature. This promise, however, was not fulfilled in the 19th century.

      That new nation, the United States of America (American literature), despite the stimulus of a robust and optimistic society, flamboyant personalities on the frontier, a generous share of genius, and the writing of lives by eminent authors such as Washington Irving and Henry James, produced no biographies of real importance. One professional biographer, James Parton, published competent, well-researched narratives, such as his lives of Aaron Burr and Andrew Jackson, but they brought him thin rewards and are today outmoded. In France, biography was turned inward, to romantic introspection, a trend introduced by Étienne Pivert de Senancour's (Senancour, Étienne Pivert de) Obermann (1804). It was followed by autobiographies thinly disguised as novels such as Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (1816), La Vie de Henri Brulard of Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), and similar works by Alphonse de Lamartine and Alfred de Musset, in which the emotional malaise of the hero is subjected to painstaking analysis. In Great Britain the 19th century opened promisingly with an outburst of biographical–autobiographical production, much of which came from prominent figures of the Romantic Movement, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey. Thomas Moore's Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830), John Gibson Lockhart's elaborate life (1837–38) of his father-in-law, Sir Walter Scott, and, later, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), James Anthony Froude's study of Carlyle (2 vol. 1882; 2 vol. 1884), John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens (1872–74) all followed, to some degree, what may loosely be called the Boswell formula. Yet most of these major works are marred by evasions and omissions of truth—though Lockhart and Froude, for example, were attacked as conscienceless despoilers of the dead—and, before the middle of the century, biography was becoming stifled. As the 20th century biographer and critic Sir Harold Nicolson (Nicolson, Sir Harold) wrote in The Development of English Biography (1927), “Then came earnestness, and with earnestness hagiography descended on us with its sullen cloud . . . .” Insistence on respectability, at the expense of candour, had led Carlyle to observe acridly, “How delicate, how decent is English biography, bless its mealy mouth!” and to pillory its productions as “vacuum-biographies.”

20th century
      The period of modern biography was ushered in, generally speaking, by World War I. All the arts were in ferment, and biographical literature shared in the movement, partly as a reaction against 19th-century conventions, partly as a response to advances in psychology, and partly as a search for new means of expression. This revolution, unlike that at the end of the 18th century, was eventually destined to enlarge and enhance the stature of biography. The chief developments of modern life writing may be conveniently classified under five heads: (1) an increase in the numbers and general competence of biographies throughout the Western world; (2) the influence on biographical literature of the counterforces of science and fictional writing; (3) the decline of formal autobiography and of biographies springing from a personal relationship; (4) the range and variety of biographical expression; and (5) the steady, though moderate, growth of a literature of biographical criticism. Only the first three of these developments need much elaboration.

      Little has been said about biography since the Renaissance in Germany, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia, and the Slavic countries because, as in the case of Russia, there had been comparatively little biographical literature and because biographical trends, particularly since the end of the 18th century, generally followed those of Britain and France. Russian literary genius in prose is best exemplified during both the 19th and 20th centuries in the novel. In the 19th century, however, Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Leo)'s numerous autobiographical writings, such as Childhood and Boyhood, and Sergey Aksakov (Aksakov, Sergey Timofeyevich)'s Years of Childhood and A Russian Schoolboy, and in the 20th century, Maksim Gorky (Gorky, Maksim)'s autobiographical trilogy (Childhood; In the World; and My Universities, 1913–23) represent, in specialized form, a limited biographical activity. The close control of literature exercised by the 20th-century Communist governments of eastern Europe has created a wintry climate for biography. The rest of Europe, outside the iron curtain, has manifested in varying degrees the fresh biographical energies and practices illustrated in British–American life writing: biography is now, as never before, an international art that shares a more or less common viewpoint.

      The second characteristic of modern biography, its being subject to the opposing pressures of science and fictional writing, has a dark as well as a bright side. Twentieth-century fiction, boldly and restlessly experimental, has, on the one hand, influenced the biographer to aim at literary excellence, to employ devices of fiction suitable for biographical ends; but, on the other, fiction has also probably encouraged the production of popular pseudobiography, hybrids of fact and fancy, as well as of more subtle distortions of the art form. Science has exerted two quite different kinds of pressure: the prestige of the traditional sciences, in their emphasis on exactitude and rigorous method, has undoubtedly contributed to a greater diligence in biographical research and an uncompromising scrutiny of evidences; but science's vast accumulating of facts—sometimes breeding the worship of fact for its own sake—has helped to create an atmosphere in which today's massive, note-ridden and fact-encumbered lives proliferate and has probably contributed indirectly to a reluctance in the scholarly community to take the risks inevitable in true biographical composition.

      The particular science of psychology, as earlier pointed out, has conferred great benefits upon the responsible practitioners of biography. It has also accounted in large part, it would appear, for the third characteristic of modern biography: the decline of formal autobiography and of the grand tradition of biography resulting from a personal relationship. For psychology has rendered the self more exposed but also more elusive, more fascinatingly complex and, in the darker reaches, somewhat unpalatable. Since honesty would force the autobiographer into a self-examination both formidable to undertake and uncomfortable to publish, instead he generally turns his attention to outward experiences and writes memoirs and reminiscences—though France offers something of an exception in the journals of such writers as André Gide (1947–51), Paul Valéry (1957), François Mauriac (1934–50), Julien Green (1938–58). Similarly, psychology, in revealing the fallacies of memory, the distorting power of an emotional relationship, the deceits of observation, has probably discouraged biography written by a friend of its subject. Moreover, so many personal papers are today preserved that a life-long friend of the subject scarcely has time to complete his biography.

      After World War I, the work of Lytton Strachey (Strachey, Lytton) played a somewhat similar role to that of Boswell in heading a “revolution” in biography. Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria (1921), followed by Elizabeth and Essex (1928), with their artful selection, lacquered style, and pervasive irony, exerted an almost intoxicating influence in the 1920s and '30s. Writers seeking to capitalize on Strachey's popularity and ape Strachey's manner, without possessing Strachey's talents, produced a spate of “debunking” biographies zestfully exposing the clay feet of famous historical figures. By World War II, however, this kind of biography had been discredited; Strachey's adroit detachment and literary skill were recognized to be his true value, not his dangerously interpretative method; and, since that time, biography has steadied into an established, if highly varied, form of literature.

Other literatures
      Biography as an independent art form, with its concentration upon the individual life and its curiosity about the individual personality, is essentially a creation of the West. In Asia, for all its long literary heritage, and in Islam, too, biographical literature does not show the development, nor assume the importance, of Western life writing. In China, until comparatively recently, biography had been an appendage, or by-product, of historical writing and scholarly preoccupation with the art of government, in the continuing tradition of the “Historical Records” of Sima Qian and Pan Gu. In India (Indian literature) it has been the enduring concern for spiritual values and for contemplation or mystical modes of existence that have exerted the deepest influence on literature from the first millennium BC to the present, and this has not provided a milieu suitable to biographical composition. Generally speaking, the literary history of Japan, too, offers only fragmentary or limited examples of life writing.

      It was not until the beginning of the 20th century in China that biography began to appear as an independent form (and this was evidently the result of western influence), when Liang Qichao (1873–1929) wrote a number of lives, including one of Confucius, and was followed by Hu Shi (Hu Shih) (1891–1962), who, like his predecessor, worked to promote biographical composition as an art form. Except for China after the establishment of the Communist state in 1949, biography in Asia—notably in India and Japan—has shared, to a limited extent, the developments in biographical literature demonstrated in the rest of the world.

Biographical literature today
      In the United States (American literature), Great Britain, and the rest of the Western world generally, biography today enjoys a moderate popular and critical esteem. In the year 1929, at the height of the biographical “boom,” there were published in the United States 667 new biographies; in 1962 exactly the same number appeared, the population in the meantime having increased by something like 50 percent. On the average, in the English-speaking world, biographical titles account for approximately 5 percent of the annual output of books. Yet they have won their share of literary prizes and for their authors a considerable degree of literary eminence; if few universally acclaimed masterpieces are being produced, it is probably true that the art of biography is seeing a higher general level of achievement than ever before. The recreation of a life is also now being attempted in other media than that of prose. Biographical drama (dramatic literature) has of course been staged from before the time of Shakespeare; it continues to be popular, whether translated from narrative to the theatre (as the Diary of Anne Frank) or written specifically for the stage, like Jean Anouilh's Becket and Robert Bolt's study of Sir Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons (which nonetheless owes a great deal to William Roper). The cinema often follows with its versions of such plays; it likewise produces original biographical films, generally with indifferent success. Television, too, offers historical “recreations” of various sorts, and with varying degrees of responsibility, but has achieved only a few notable examples of biographical illumination, for the conflict between gripping visual presentation and the often undramatic, but important, biographical truth is difficult to resolve. Biography, indeed, seems less innovative, less rewarding of experiment, and less adaptable to new media, than does fiction or perhaps even history. Words are no longer the only way to tell a story and perhaps in time will not be regarded as the chief way; but so far they seem the best way of unfolding the full course of a life and exploring the quirks and crannies of a personality. Anchored in the truth of fact, though seeking the truth of interpretation, biography tends to be more stable than other literary arts; and its future would appear to be a predictably steady evolution of its present trends.

Additional Reading

Critical and scholarly books
James L. Clifford, From Puzzles to Portraits: Problems of a Literary Biographer (1970), examples of the author's own research on biography followed by an analysis of biographical problems; Leon Edel, Literary Biography (1959), essentially an account of the methods, psychological and narrative, used by the author in his multivolume life of Henry James; John A. Garraty, The Nature of Biography (1957), a historical survey coupled with a study of biographical methods, with emphasis on aids offered by psychology; Paul M. Kendall, The Art of Biography (1965), a historical survey, with emphasis on contemporary biography, and a study of biographical problems from the viewpoint of a practicing biographer; Andre Maurois, Aspects de la biographie (1928; Eng. trans. 1930) and Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (1928), particularly interesting for complementary views of the “new” biography of the 1920s by two eminent biographers; Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960), a historical survey and a study of the chief problems, aspects, and varieties of autobiography; William M. Runyan, Life Histories and Psychobiography (1982), a discussion of methodologies used in conducting psychobiographical research.

Anthologies
James L. Clifford (ed.), Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism 1560–1960 (1962); William H. Davenport and Ben Siegel (eds.), Biography Past and Present (1965), contains a number of critical essays as well as biographical selections; Edgar Johnson (ed.), A Treasury of Biography (1941); John C. Metcalfe (ed.), The Stream of English Biography (1930).

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Universalium. 2010.

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