biography

Click a letter for the index

Or search the encyclopaedia:

 

 

Go

 

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

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

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

20th century, USA and UK
Twentieth-century biographers include US academic Richard Ellmann (who wrote on the Irish writers James Joyce and Oscar Wilde), and English writer Elizabeth Longford (who wrote on Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington).

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

Although often coloured yellow, the island is intended to be copper, reflecting the country's name, ‘Copper Island’. Effective date: c. September 1960. >>