Concept
Biography
Overview
A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description or account of a person's life. It involves more than just basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death. It portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of their life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of the subject's personality.
Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Works in diverse media, from literature to film, form the genre known as biography.
An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation, and at times, participation of a subject or a subject's heirs. An unauthorized biography is one written without such permission or participation. An autobiography is written by its subject, sometimes with the assistance of a collaborator or ghostwriter.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Biography is discussed.
Biography is by nature the most universally profitable, universally pleasant of all things: especially Biography of distinguished individuals.
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, and
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
If biography is presented as a dramatic summary of social needs and achievements, if the child’s imagination pictures the social defects and problems that clamored for the man and the ways in which the individual met the emergency, then the biography is an organ of social study.
John Dewey, The school and society
states what it is; names the idea
But before making the transition, there are two points which must be made clear. First: Everything outside my own personal biography is outside my experience; therefore if anything can be known by me outside my biography, it can only be known in one of two ways: (1) By inference from things within my biography, or (2) By some a priori principle independent of experience. I do not myself believe that anything…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
names the idea; states what it is
For this purpose, we may, at least to begin with, confine ourselves within a single biography. If we can always say when two "sensibilia" in a given biography are appearances of one thing, then, since we have seen how to connect "sensibilia" in different biographies as appearances of the same momentary state of a thing, we shall have all that is necessary for the complete construction of the history of a thing. It…
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the problem of Burns's Biography has yet been adequately solved. We do not allude so much to deficiency of facts or documents,--though of these we are still every day receiving some fresh accession,--as to the limited and imperfect application of them to the great end of Biography. Our notions upon this subject may perhaps appear extravagant; but if an individual is really…
Thomas Carlyle, Life of Robert Burns
names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Biography
Related ideas
- Giorgio Vasari
- Jesus
- Feminism
- Gospel
- Thomas Carlyle
- Hadrian
- Abraham
- John Stuart Mill
- Julius Caesar
- Jainism
- Hagiography
- London
- Literacy
- Sociology
- Middle Ages
- Muhammad
- Monarch
- Tyrant
- Mesopotamia
- Autobiography
- Psychology
- Psychoanalysis
- Ghostwriter
- Plutarch
Place in the tradition
Part of A. C. Grayling.