Biography

A biography is the story of a person's life. The word comes from the Greek words bios (which means life) and graphein (which means write). When the biography is written by the person it is about, it is called an autobiography.

A written biography is a part of literature. Biographies can also be made as movies (often called biopics) or told as stories.

The oldest written biographies that historians have were written to record rulers' lives. Some were written in Assyria, ancient Babylonia, ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia. Biographies were an early form of history. Another early form of biography was called hagiography, meaning writing about holy people.

In ancient China, a biography was one of the basic forms of a history book. In India, biographies of Buddha and his reincarnated lives were written. In ancient Greece, people wrote biographies of people that were not rulers too. Xenophon wrote a biography of Socrates and gave this book the name Memorabilia (Memories). During the Roman Empire, Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives about ancient Greek and Roman politicians, and Suetonius wrote biographies of the Roman emperors. The Gospels were also biographies of Jesus Christ.

In West Africa, griots tell histories which often include biographies.

Many written biographies today are released by publishers as products for sale.

Biography Media

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  Third volume of a 1727 edition of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans printed by Jacob Tonson

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  John Foxe's The Book of Martyrs, was one of the earliest English-language biographies.

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  James Boswell wrote what many consider to be the first modern biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, in 1791.

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  Eminent Victorians set the standard for 20th century biographical writing, when it was published in 1918.

Related pages

• Autobiography
• Curriculum vitae