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Autobiography

Autobiography: Encyclopedia - Autobiography

An autobiography (from the Greek auton, '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 dates from the late eighteenth century, but the form is much older. Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. A name for such a work in Antiquity was an apologia, essentially more self-justificat ...

Including:

Autobiography - Notable autobiographies

Autobiography - Secondary literature

Autobiography, Autobiography - Notable autobiographies, Autobiography - Secondary literature

Autobiography: Encyclopedia - Autobiography

Autobiography

For music albums named Autobiography, see Autobiography (album)

An autobiography (from the Greek auton, '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 dates from the late eighteenth century, but the form is much older.

Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. A name for such a work in Antiquity was an apologia, essentially more self-justification than introspection. John Henry Newman's autobiography is his Apologia pro vita sua. Augustine applied the title Confessions to his autobiographical work (and Jean-Jacques Rousseau took up the same title). Probably the most famous German autobiography is still Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the first secular biography published in the United States, served as a model for subsequent American autobiographies. African American autobiography has developed from slave narratives. Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois have both published several autobiographies.

A memoir is slightly different from an autobiography. Where an autobiography focuses on the "life and times" of the character, a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on his or her own memories, feelings and emotions. The pagan rhetor Libanius framed his life memoir as one of his orations, not the public kind, but the literary kind that would be read aloud in the privacy of one's study.

Modern memoirs are often based on old diaries, letters, and photographs.

Until the last 20 years or so, few people without some degree of fame tried to write and publish a memoir. But with the critical and commercial success of such memoirs Angela's Ashes and The Color of Water more and more people have been encouraged to try their hand at this genre.

Paul Delaney has coined the term "ad hoc autobiography" to describe an autobiography motivated by the desire to exploit some temporary notoriety. Such autobiographies, often written by a ghostwriter, are routinely published on the lives of professional athletes and media celebrities—and to a lesser extent about politicians. Some celebrities admit to not having read their "autobiographies."

Mark Twain was probably the first popular person to include photography in his autobiography. He was specially interested and involved on the taking of the pictures to control his photographic persona.

Autobiography - Notable autobiographies

(in addition to those referenced in the article)

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907.
Wallace Black Elk and John J. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, 1931.
Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, 1728.
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1821.
Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1927 and 1929
Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs, 1885.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, 1903.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 1873.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1966.
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1966-76.
Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, 1967, 1969.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, 1964.
Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought, 1933.
Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 1931.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854.
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.

Autobiography - Secondary literature

Barros, Carolyn A. "Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation". Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1998.
Buckley,Jerome Hamilton. "The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse Since 1800". Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Lejeune, Philippe, On autobiography, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Mostern, Kenneth: "Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America", New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Olney, James: "Memory & Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing". Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Pascal, Roy. "Design and Truth in Autobiography". Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.
Stover, Johnnie M., Rhetoric and resistance in black women's autobiography, Gainesville, Fla. [u.a.] : Univ. Press of Florida, 2003