BIOGRAPHY

form of nonfictional literature, the subject of which is the life of an individual. In general, the form is considered to include autobiography, in which the subject recounts his or her own history. Biography can be seen as a branch of history, because it depends on a selective ordering and interpretation of materials, written and oral, established through research and personal recollection. It can also be seen as a branch of imaginative literature in that it seeks to convey a sense of the individuality and significance of the subject through creative sympathetic insight. The earliest biographical writing probably consisted of funeral speeches and inscriptions, usually praising the life and example of the deceased. From this evolved the laudatory and exemplary biography with its associated problems of uncritical or distorted interpretation of available evidence. Such lives are still found, but they have produced their own antithesis in the denunciatory or debunking biography of which Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) is a famous modern example. Both kinds of biography were incorporated in early historical writing and oratory in which individual behaviour and character were of significance for the general discussion. Particular philosophical, religious, or political causes were often popularized by biographical means. Plato and Xenophon helped to vindicate Socrates by writing about his life as well as his teaching; the gospels did much the same for Jesus of Nazareth. Stoic biographies of Cato and Brutus served to attack the Roman principate, just as R.R. Madden's Lives of the United Irishmen implicitly attacked English rule in 19th-century Ireland. The origins of modern biography as a distinct genre lie not with eulogy or admiring accounts of great sages and saints but with Plutarch's moralizing lives of prominent Greeks and Romans and Suetonius' gossipy lives of the Caesars, which quote documentary sources. While kings and leaders of men attracted biographical attention as a part of the general historical record of their times, there are few vernacular lives of individuals considered for themselves until the 16th century. In England, William Roper's life of Thomas More (1626) is an important example, and in the next century Izaak Walton and John Aubrey produced brief biographies of writers and eminent persons. But the major developments of English biography came in the 18th century with Samuel Johnson's critical Lives of the English Poets and James Boswell's massive Life of Johnson (1791), which combines detailed records of conversation and behaviour with considerable psychological insight. This provided the model for exhaustive, monumental 19th-century biographies such as A.P. Stanley's Life of Arnold and Lord Morley's Gladstone. Thomas Carlyle's conviction that history was the history of great men demonstrated the general belief of the time that biographical writing was an important method of understanding society and its institutions. In modern times, impatience with Victorian reticence and deference and the development of psychoanalysis have sometimes led to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding of the biographical subject. Leon Edel's massive Henry James is a good example. Another modern development has been the group-biography of a family or small body of close associates. It has been recognized that a biographer is not neutral but discloses aspects of his own personality in the presentation and interpretation of the biographee. This is much more the case with autobiography; indeed the manner may reveal as much about the subject as the matter. Though self-justification may provide the autobiographical impulse, so also may self-contempt, particularly when linked with some intellectual, religious, or emotional crisis that precipitates change. Such crises, beginning perhaps with the conversion of St. Augustine described in his Confessions, provide the focal point of many autobiographies but may have the effect of unconsciously distorting antecedent experience since the reader is offered a kind of manifesto that is only secondarily a personal record. But autobiography may recount the experiences, however scandalous, of travelers, lovers, or rascals, more or less for their own sake. Again, autobiography may be undertaken for partly therapeutic ends, seeking to establish an ironic or formal distance from painful or chaotic experience and to trace patterns of coherence in it. Biographical and autobiographical writing can easily pass into fiction when rational inference or conjecture pass over into imaginative reconstruction or frank invention or when the biographical subject itself is wholly or partly imaginary. form of nonfictional literature, the subject of which is the life of an individual. One of the oldest forms of literary expression, it seeks to recreate in words the life of a human being, that of the writer himself or of another person, drawing upon the resources, memory and all available evidenceswritten, oral, pictorial. 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 15601960 (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).