Autobiography & Biography

Autobiography

An autobiography, from the Greek autos, 'self', bios, 'life' and graphein, 'write', is a biography written by the subject or composed conjointly with a collaborative writer (styled "as told to" or "with"). The term was first used by the poet Robert Southey in 1809 in the English periodical Quarterly Review, but the form goes back to antiquity. Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography however may be based entirely on the writer's memory. Closely associated with autobiography (and sometimes difficult to precisely distinguish from it) is the form of memoir.
Memoir
A memoir is slightly different in character from an autobiography. Whilst an autobiography typically focuses on the "life and times" of the writer, a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on his or her own memories, feelings and emotions. Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. The English Civil War (1642-1651) provoked a number of examples of this genre, including works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. French examples from the same period include the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz (1614-1679) and the Duc de Saint-Simon (1675-1755).

. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: autobiography

Biography of oneself narrated by oneself. Little autobiographical literature exists from antiquity and the Middle Ages; with a handful of exceptions, the form begins to appear only in the 15th century. Autobiographical works take many forms, from intimate writings made during life that are not necessarily intended for publication (including letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and reminiscences) to the formal autobiography. Outstanding examples of the genre extend from St. Augustine's Confessions (c. AD 400) to Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory (1951).

Psychoanalysis: Autobiography
As a literary genre, autobiography, narrating the story of one's own life, is a variation of biography, a form of writing that describes the life of a particular individual. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, autobiography is of interest as the story told by the patient to the analyst and to himself.
Autobiography in the modern sense began as a form of confession (Saint Augustine), even though there are memoirs in classical literature (Xenophon's Anabasis, Julius Caesar's Gallic wars). Such introspective works can be considered attempts at self-analysis before the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious. In 1925 Freud wrote An Autobiographical Study, in which the story of his own life merges with that of the creation of psychoanalysis. According to Freud, biographical truth does not exist, since the author must rely on lies, secrets, and hypocrisy (letter to Arnold Zweig dated May 31, 1939). The same is true of autobiography. From this point of view, it is interesting that Freud framed his theoretical victory and the birth of psychoanalysis in terms of a psychological novel.
The function of autobiography is to use scattered bits of memory to create the illusion of a sense of continuity that can hide the anxiety of the ephemeral, or even of the absence of the meaning of existence, from a purely narcissistic point of view. This story constitutes a narrative identity (Ricoeur, 1984-1988) but is self-contained. In contrast, the job of analysis is to modify, indeed to deconstruct, this identity through interpretation. Because the analyst reveals repressed content, he is always a potential spoiler of the patient's autobiographic story (Mijolla-Mellor, 1988).
Although autobiography has been of greater interest to literature (Lejeune, 1975) than to psychoanalysis, a number of psychoanalysts (Wilfred Bion and Marie Bonaparte, among others) have written autobiographies, thus confirming the link between the analyst's pursuit of self-analysis and autobiographical reflection.
Grammar Dictionary: autobiography

A literary work about the writer's own life. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa are autobiographical. Literary Glossary: Autobiography
A narrative in which an individual tells his or her life story. Examples include Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Amy Hempel's story "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried," which has autobiographical characteristics even though it is a work of fiction.


Nature of autobiography

The classical period: Apologia, oration, confession
In antiquity such works were typically entitled apologia, implying as much self-justification as self-documentation. John Henry Newman's autobiography (first published in 1864) is entitled Apologia Pro Vita Sua in reference to this tradition.
The pagan rhetor Libanius (c. 314-394) framed his life memoir (Oration I begun in 374) as one of his orations, not of a public kind, but of a literary kind that could be read aloud in privacy.
Augustine (354-430) applied the title Confessions to his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same title in the 18th century, initiating the chain of confessional and sometimes racy and highly self-critical, autobiographies of the Romantic era and beyond.
Early autobiographies
One of the first great autobiographies of the Renaissance is that of the sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), written between 1558 and 1556, and entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life). He declares at the start: 'No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem great achievements, if he cares for truth and goodness, ought to write the story of his own life in his own hand; but no one should venture on such a splendid undertaking before he is over forty'.[1] These criteria for autobiography generally persisted until recent times, and most serious autobiographies of the next three hundred years conformed to them. Other autobiographies of the period include those of the Italian physician Geronimo Cardano (1574).
The earliest known autobiography in English is the early 15th-century Booke of Margery Kempe, describing among other things her pilgrimage to the Holy Land and visit to Rome. The book remained in manuscript and was not published until 1936.
Notable English autobiographies of the seventeenth century include those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1643, published 1764) and John Bunyan (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinnners, (1666)).
Versions of the autobiography form
Sensationalist and celebrity 'autobiographies'


From the seventeenth century onwards, "scandalous memoirs" by supposed libertines, serving a public taste for titillation, have been frequently published. Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely works of fiction written by ghostwriters. A well-known example is Daniel Defoe's 'fictional autobiography' (see below) Moll Flanders.
So-called "autobiographies", generally written by a ghostwriter, are routinely published on the lives of modern professional athletes and media celebrities—and to a lesser extent about politicians. Some celebrities, such as Naomi Campbell, admit to not having read their "autobiographies."
Autobiographies of the non-famous

By the 1940s, the American James Thurber was able to write of Cellini's strictures of fame and age for autobiographers, 'Nowadays, nobody who has a typewriter pays any attnetion to the old master's quaint rules'. Until recent years, few people without some genuine claim to fame wrote or published autobiographies for the general public. But with the critical and commercial success in the United States of such memoirs as Angela's Ashes and The Color of Water more and more people have been encouraged to try their hand at this genre.
Fictional autobiography
The term "fictional autobiography" has been coined to define novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own biography, of which Defoe's Moll Flanders, mentioned above, is an early example. J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is a well-known modern example of a fictional autobiography. The term may also apply to works of fiction purporting to be autobiographies of real characters, e.g. Stephen Marlowe's The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes (1996).
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Quotes About: Autobiography
"Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self." - W. H. Auden"Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another." - Augusto Roa Bastos"Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form -- it may be called fleeting or eternal -- is in neither case the stuff that life is made of." - Walter Benjamin"Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form." - John Berger"A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become." - Fawn M. Brodie"Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst." - Italo Calvino
Notable autobiographies
Peter Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, 12th century
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907
Anna Akhmatova, Hope Against Hope, 1910
Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, 1969
Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, 397
Black Elk and John J. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, 1931
Roald Dahl, Boy & Going Solo, 1986
Giacomo Casanova, Histoire de ma vie, published posthumously in 1826.
Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, 1728
Fredrick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 1845
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 1869
Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1927 and 1929
Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs, 1885
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road, 1942
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, 1903
Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home, 1937
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 1873
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1966
Joaquim Nabuco, Minha formação, 1900
Jawaharlal Nehru, Autobiography, 1936
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1966-76
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1821
Manfred von Richthofen (Red baron), Der rote Kampfflieger (The Red Battle Flier), 1917
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Les Confessions), 1770, published 1782
Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, 1967, 1969
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, 1964
Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought, 1933
Alan Sillitoe, Life Without Armour, 1995
Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 1931
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Autobiography, 1917
Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, 1735-1741
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, 1901
Frank Lloyd Wright, Autobiography, 1943
Richard Wright, Black Boy, 1945
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965
William Butler Yeats, Autobiography, 1936




How do you write an autobiography?,
When writing an autobiography, you focus on three major things: who you are in life, what life means to you and what your outlook on the future is.

The first thing you do when writing an autobiography is start off with a lot of facts about your life; for example, when and where you were born, where you live (city and state), where you go to school and who you live with. You have to give a lot of information so your reader can clearly understand what is going on. Once you have written this introduction, you are ready to start your first paragraph of the autobiography.
Who you are in life?
The best way to start an autobiography is to state your name. When you are writing this paragraph, you usually explain the type of person you are; use facts about yourself such as: have you won any awards? What types of awards have you won? Did you finish school? Do you plan on going to college?

What life means to you?
This is now your second paragraph. In this paragraph you should state how you see life--what does life mean to you. Are you happy or sad? Do you have a lot of friends or just a few? How do you make your school days go by? Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend? What are your favorite places to go on dates? How long have you been dating? If you are involved in a relationship, do you think it will last forever?


What is your outlook on the future?
In this paragraph you should explain what you think the future will be like. Pick a year and explain how it will be but explain it through your eyes. Where will you be? How will you be living? Will you be married? Will there be any kids? Who will you be married to? What is he/she like? How long will you have been together?


Conclusion
The conclusion is the last paragraph of your autobiography and an important one, too. In the conclusion you usually try to re-word the introduction and add some type of closure to bring the whole autobiography together.

Here is an example of an autobiography:
I was born on a warm, sunny day in June in Sarasota, Florida. I still live in Sarasota, Florida, and I go to school at Booker High School. I live with my mom,Kate; my brother, Jake; and my Aunt Molly. When I was born, my bother was fifteen-months-old and hid under the table from me. Jake is a sweet kid and he would do anything for me, but like all brothers and sisters we fight like cats and dogs. Sometimes when no one was around, Jake would come up to me and bite my toes for no reason. I still love him but only because he is my brother.

Who I am in life.
My name is Sally Friday. I started school when I was six-years-old. I went to kindergarten through fifth grade at Booker Elementary and while I was there, I won an award for perfect attendance. I also won an award for honor roll all four terms. Then I attended Booker Middle School, and there I also won a couple of awards: one for perfect attendance and two for being named Student of the Year--one in sixth grade and the other in eighth grade. I am now a senior at Booker High School. I plan on finishing school and maybe going to a community college.

What life means to me.
Life to me means friends and family who you can trust and who trusts you. I am pretty much on the happy side of life, but like all teens I do I have my \"days of.\" That means I do have some sad days or depressed days. I have a few frinds here that sort of look out for me and when I am having a bad day, I have someone here at school to talk to. I make my school days go by thinking of either the next hour or what I will do when I get home or on the weekend. I'm not seeing anyone now but when I did have a boyfriend, our favorite places to go were the movies and out to dinner. Sometimes we went to the beach. Only once we went to an amusement park: Universal Studios. We were together for twenty-nine days and then we broke-up; so no, I don't think it was forever.

What's my outlook on the future.
The year 2018 will make twenty years since I graduated from high school. I think I will probably be still living here in Sarasota. I will be quite comfortable with my living situation, meaning that I will be married to Paul Smith. We will have one child: Linda Treasa Smith, who at that point will be three-years-old and a little devil. Paul is a sweet guy; he will do anything for anyone. He is six feet tall and built well. He has baby blue eyes and blond hair. We will have been together for five years and will be happy together--this is forever.

Conclusion
As I said in the beginning, I was born here in Florida and I've lived here my whole life. I would like to see more of the USA but unfortunatly, I don't have any money to leave Florida to go anywhere right now. I hope you have enjoyed reading my life story as much as I have enjoyed writing it for you. Try to get as much as you can out of school; you're only there for twelve years and when you graduate, you're home free. Here's a tip for you to live or try to live by: If you think it, it can be done.




Biography

A biography (from the Greek words bios meaning "life", and graphos meaning "write") is an account of a person's life, usually published in the form of a book or essay, or in some other form, such as a film. An autobiography (auto, meaning "self", giving self-biography) is a biography by the same person it is about. A biography is more than a list of impersonal facts (like birth, education, work, relationships and death), it also portrays the subject's experience of those events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (resume), a biography presents the subject's story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experiences, and may include an analysis of the subject's personality.
A work is biographical if it covers all of a person's life. As such, biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Together, all biographical works form the genre known as biography, in literature, film, and other forms of media.
Early forms
The first known biographies were written by scribes commissioned by the various rulers of antiquity: ancient Assyria, ancient Babylonia, ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, among others. Such biographies tended to be chiseled into stone or clay tablets, a method called cuneiform.
Perhaps the drawings in caves can be considered the first biographies. Some of them appear to relate events such as a successful hunt. The artists (biographers?) and viewers would know (by clues that escape us in the drawings) who was being honored.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
The Early Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450) saw a decline in awareness of classical culture. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of early history in Europe was the Roman Catholic Church. Hermits, monks and priests used this historic period to write the first modern biographies. Their subjects were usually restricted to church fathers, martyrs, popes and saints. Their works were meant to be inspirational to people, vehicles for conversion to Christianity. See hagiography. One significant example of biography from this period which does not exactly fit into that mold is the life of Charlemagne as written by his courtier Einhard.
By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented as biographies of kings, knights and tyrants began to appear. The most famous of these such biographies was 'Le Morte d'Arthur' by Sir Thomas Malory. The book was an account of the life of the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) was a landmark biography focusing on secular lives. Vasari created celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early "best seller." Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the gradual increase in literacy.
Biographies in the English language began appearing during the reign of Henry VIII. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, essentially was the first dictionary of biography, followed by Thomas Fuller’s The History of the Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct focus on public life.
Modern biography
The "Golden Age" of English biography emerged in the late 1700s, the century in which the terms "biography" and "autobiography" entered the English lexicon. The classic works of the period were Samuel Johnson's Critical Lives of the Poets (1779-81) and James Boswell's massive Life of Johnson (1791). The Boswellian approach to biography emphasized uncovering material and letting the subject "speak for itself." While Boswell compiled, Samuel Johnson composed. Johnson did not follow a chronological narration of the subject's life but used anecdotes and incidents selectively. Johnson rejected the notion that facts revealed truth. He suggested that biographers should seek their subject in "domestic privacies", to find little known facts or anecdotes which revealed character. (Casper, 1999)
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 Puritan and Quaker memoirists and journal-keepers where the form continued to be influential. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (1791) would provide the archetype for the American success story. (Stone, 1982) Autobiography would remain an influential form of biographical writing.
Generally, American biography followed the English model, however, incorporating Thomas Carlyle's view that biography was a part of history. Carlyle asserted that the lives of great human beings to understanding society and its institutions. While the historical impulse would remain a strong element in early American biography, American writers carved out their own distinct approach. What emerged was a rather didactic form of biography which sought to shape individual character of the reader in the process of defining national character. (Casper, 1999)
The distinction between mass biography and literary biography which had formed by the middle of the nineteenth century 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 series of biographical sketches. (Casper, 1999) The topical emphasis shifted from republican heroes to self-made men and women.
Much of late 19th-century biography remained formulaic. Notably, few autobiographies had been written in the 19th 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), a chronicle of self-defined failure which ran counter to the predominant American success story. The publication of socially significant autobiographies by both men and women began to flourish. (Stone, 1982)
The authority of psychology and sociology was ascendant and would make its mark on the new century’s biographies. (Stone, 1982) 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, 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. (Casper, 1999)
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, 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 and via public libraries.
According to the scholar Caroyln Heilbrun, women's biographies were revolutionized during the second wave of feminist activism in the 1970s. At this time women began to be portrayed more accurately, even if it downplayed the achievements or integrity of a man (Heilbrun 12).
Multi-media forms
With the technological advancements created in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, multi-media forms of biography became much more popular than literary forms. Visual and film images were able to elaborate new dimensions of personality that written forms could not. The popularity of these forms of biography culminated in the creation of such cable and satellite television networks as A&E, The Biography Channel, The History Channel and History International. Along with documentary film biographies, Hollywood produced numerous commercial films based on the lives of famous people.
More recently, CD-ROM and online biographies are appearing. Unlike books and films, they often do not tell a chronological story; instead, they are archives of many discrete media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles. Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways (Manovich 220).





Book Awards

Annually, several countries offer their writers a specific prize for writing a biography such as the:


· Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize – Canada
· National Biography Award – Australia
· Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography – United States
· Whitbread Prize for Best Biography – United Kingdom
· J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography – United Kingdom
· Casper, Scott E. Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
· Heilbrun, Carolyn. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.
· Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
References
· Casper, Scott E. Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
· Heilbrun, Carolyn. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.
· Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Autobiography in Encyclopaedia Britannica, (1963 edition).