Biography

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Sir Thomas Malory wrote the most famous fictional biography of the Middle Ages with Le Morte d'Arthur about the life of King Arthur.

This is an article on biographies. For information on policies concerning biographical articles on Wikipedia, please see Wikipedia:Biography. For the television series, see Biography (television program).

Biography (from the Greek words bios meaning life, and graphein meaning write) is a genre of literature and other forms of media like film, based on the written accounts of individual lives. While a biography may focus on a subject of fiction or non-fiction, the term is usually in reference to non-fiction. As opposed to a profile or curriculum vitae, a biography develops complex insight and highlights different textures of personality including intimate details of experiences. A biography is more than a list of impertinent facts like birth, education, work, relationships and death. It also delves into the emotions of experiencing such events.

Early forms

The first known 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.

Classical forms

Ancient Greece developed biographies that tended not to be objective. Rather, these biographies were defenses of controversial people of the era they were living. The best known of the classical biographies include Memorabilia by Xenophon, Parallel Lives by Plutarch and Lives of Caesars by Suetonius. During the reign of the Roman Empire, the Gospels attributed to John, Luke, Mark and Matthew in the New Testament of the Bible were biographies about Jesus. 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.

Middle ages

The Early Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450) saw a decline in awareness of classical culture. 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. See hagiography. One significant example of biography from this period which does not exactly fit into that mold is the life of Charlemagne as written by his courtier Einhard.

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.

Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) was a landmark biography focusing on secular lives. Vasari created celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early "best seller." Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the gradual increase in literacy.

Multi-media forms

With the technological advancements created in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, multi-media forms of biography became much more popular than literary forms. Visual and film images were able to elaborate new dimensions of personality that written forms could not. The popularity of these forms of biography culminated in the creation of such cable and satellite television networks as A&E, The Biography Channel, The History Channel and History International.

Book Awards

Annually, several countries offer their writers a specific prize for writing a biography such as the:

• Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize – Canada
• Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography – United States
• Whitbread Prize for Best Biography – United Kingdom

See also

• List of biographers
• Lists of people
• List of political career biographies
• Autobiography
• Family history
• People
• Historical document
• Dictionary of National Biography (DNB, notable figures from British history)
• NNDB (Notable Names Database)

External links

• Biography directory
• Most Honored Biography at the Book Award Annals
• Biographies and Memoirs
• Writing Biography & Autobiography
• Biography of Celebrity
• Collection of Biographies with Pictures