Autobiography edit
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Autobiography edit
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An autobiography, from the Greek αὐτός autos "self", βίος bios "life" and γράφειν graphein "to write",, is a biography written by its subject (or sometimes, in modern usage, 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.
See List of autobiographies and Category:Autobiography for examples.
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Diaries were originally written for personal reference, but the successful publication of the diaries of the English 17th-century civil servant and bon viveur Samuel Pepys in 1825 (transcribed from his manuscript in shorthand) drew attention to the possibilities of the diary as a form of autobiography in its own right. From the 20th century onwards, diary publication became a popular vehicle for politicians seeking vindication. Notable British examples have included the diaries of Richard Crossman and Tony Benn.
Victims and opponents of totalitarian regimes have been able to present striking critiques of these regimes by autobiographical accounts of their oppression. Amongst the most renowned of such works are the writings of Primo Levi, one of many personal accounts of the Shoah. Similarly, there are many works detailing atrocities and malevolence of Communist regimes (e.g. Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope against Hope).
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."
By the 1920s, the American tom Thurberd was able to write of Cellini's strictures of fame and age for autobiographers, 'Nowadays, nobody who has a typewriter pays any attention 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. This trend has also encouraged fake autobiographies, particularly those associated with 'misery lit' , where the writer has allegedly suffered from dysfunctional family, social problems or political repression.
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. Dickens's David Copperfield is a classic, and J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye a well-known modern example, of fictional autobiography. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is another example of fictional autobiography, as noted on the front page of the original version. 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).