Early forms of 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. These biographies only detailed accomplishments. The Jewish holy scripture is an anthology of some of the earliest biographies in existence, detailing the lives of chiefs, kings, tribes, patriarchs and prophets.
Classical biographies can be noted from ancient Greece Roman Empire , the Gospels attributed to John, Luke, Mark and Matthew in the New Testament of the Bible were biographies about Jesus.
The Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450) began with the Dark Ages, a period of mass loss of information and knowledge. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of early history 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.
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. After Malory's work, the Renaissance period conceived biographies of lesser people of society like artists and poets.
In 1640, Izaak Walton published Life of Donne, a biography about the poet John Donne. The book was the first to take on the complex style of biographical writing used today. In 1683, the first English language biography appeared in history with the publication of a biography of Plutarch by John Dryden. Interestingly enough, Dryden's work delved in great detail about Plutarch's popularization of the word biography.
An influential and widely read biography of the 18th century was Boswell's Life of Johnson (first edition, 1791). Filled with seemingly verbatim accounts of the writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson's conversations as well as many of his letters, it presented its subject to the reader with an intimacy and detail rarely seen before that time or since.
By the late 20th century, biographies were more focused on the lives of celebrities and politicians. These works typically drew on correspondence, diaries, first-hand interviews, journals, and other sources directly related to the subject. As the development of word processors and personal computers made it easier for authors to assemble vast manuscripts, biographies of a thousand pages or more became commonplace.
The Origins of Biography
Among the most ancient biographies are the narrative carvings and hieroglyphic inscriptions on Egyptian tombs and temples (c.1300 B.C.), and the cuneiform inscriptions on Assyrian palace walls (c.720 B.C.) or Persian rock faces (c.520 B.C.). All these records proclaimed the deeds of kings, although accuracy often gave way to glorification. Among the first biographies of ordinary men, the Dialogues of Plato (4th cent. B.C.) and the Gospels of the New Testament (1st and 2d cent. A.D.) reveal their respective subjects by letting each speak for himself. Even these early achievements of biography, however, lack critical balance.
Equilibrium was established by Plutarch in The Parallel Lives (2d cent. A.D.). His method was comparative, e.g., Theseus is matched with Romulus; Demosthenes with Cicero. In his conclusions, he evaluates the connection between the moral standards and worldly achievements of each. St. Augustine turned the same critical judgment on himself in his Confessions (4th cent.), comparing his character and conduct before and after his conversion to Christianity.
During the Middle Ages credibility continued to be sacrificed to credulity. In the hagiographies, or lives of the saints, human flaws and actual events were bypassed in favor of saintly traits and miracles. Yet the few secular biographies produced in that era, Einhard's Life of Charlemagne (9th cent.), Eadmer's Life of St. Anselm (12th cent.), Jean deJoinville's Memoirs of St. Louis IX (13th cent.), and Jean Froissart's Chroniques (15th cent.), redeem the genre with their lively depiction of personalities and events.
With the Renaissance came rekindled interest in worldly power and self-assertion. Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography(16th cent.), recounting his escapades and artistic achievements, is a monument to the ego. Saint-Simon's Memoirs(late 17th cent.) describe Louis XIV and his court at Versailles and record the effect of the monarch's absolute power on the daily lives of others. In England, Samuel Pepys's Diary, John Evelyn's Diary, Izaak Walton's Lives and JohnAubrey's Lives of Eminent Men (all mid-17th cent.) introduced informality and intimacy to their treatments. Each wrote about contemporaries who were their friends or acquaintances.
The Development of Biography as a Literary Form
By the 18th cent. literary biography (works about poets and men of letters) had become an important extension of the genre. Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779-81) set the example for James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson(1791), the first definitive biography. This monumental work was drawn not only from Boswell's exact recollections of conversations with Johnson, but from letters, memoirs, and interviews with others in Johnson's circle as well. Two equally celebrated autobiographies, Benjamin Franklin's, noted for its practicality, and Jean Jacques Rousseau's, noted for its candor, also mark this age.
Among the avalanche of biographies and autobiographies published in the 19th cent. Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit (1808-31), Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833-34) and Frederick the Great (1858-65), and ErnestRenan's Life of Jesus (1863) are important. Also noteworthy was the publication of the Dictionary of National Biography (1882), edited by Leslie Stephen.
As a result of Freud's defining of the unconscious, the 20th cent. produced a new sort of biography-one that used the technique of psychoanalysis on the subject. Examples of such works are Freud's own Leonardo Da Vinci (1910) and Anaïs Nin's Diaries (1931-44). As antidotes to the tradition of the official biography Lytton Strachey wroteEminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921), works that deflate and debunk.
Twentieth-century biographers often sought to make structure a reflection of theme. Henry Adams's Education of Henry Adams (1918) explores the metaphor of the title; Thomas Merton's Seven Story Mountain (1948) follows the analogue of Dante's Inferno; and Lillian Hellman's Pentimento (1973) presents portrait sketches of the people in her life as seen from the vantage point of her maturity. Notable literary and scholarly biographers of the 20th cent. include Harold Nicolson, Allan Nevins, D. S. Freeman, André Maurois, J. H. Plumb, Carl Sandburg, Dumas Malone, Elizabeth Longford, and Leon Edel.
Biography in a Multimedia Age
Motion pictures and television have adapted the form of biography to their own needs. With Paul Muni as Louis Pasteur, Charles Laughton as Rembrandt, or Spencer Tracy as Thomas Edison, films retraced for new audiences, although often in a romanticized fashion, the paths to success taken by men of intelligence and character: the old Plutarchian formula. Documentary biographies, composed of newsreel clips and photographs, have been made about public figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, the Duke of Windsor, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Two innovations of television are the dramatic documentary ("docudrama") and the interview. Ken Russell's film essays, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Company (1965-70), on Elgar, Rossetti, Delius, Richard Strauss, and Isadora Duncan attempted to convey the essence of a person's character and work rather than just the facts of his life. Homage to Plutarch was evident again in the format of Edward R. Murrow's interview program, Person to Person (1953-59), where guests like Marilyn Monroe and Sir Thomas Beecham were deliberately paired.
The television interview was expanded by such talk show hosts as Dick Cavett, David Frost, and Charlie Rose, who have led their usually well-known guests to talk about their lives for an hour or longer. The expansion of oral history programs, in which prominent figures record their reminiscences, are also providing a body of primary biographical source material. With the advent of cable television, biography became a daily staple of various channels and biographies were offered as part of the programming on channels devoted to a number of special subjects, e.g., history and education.
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