Definition:
The story of a person's life, written by another. Adjective: biographical. See also:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "life" + "write"Observations:
- "[In] the late-seventeenth-century, . . . 'biography' became the correct dictionary designation for a written record of a particular human life, but it was not distinguished from the more generic term 'biography'--[which includes] the entire field of real-life human depiction, in various media: a noble field that stretches back to classical times and beyond."
(Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History, Harvard University Press, 2007) - "Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography. . . . Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable."
(Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1890) - "Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written."
(Mark Twain, Autobiography, 1924) - "Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both. In the historian's view biography is a kind of frogspawn--it takes ten thousand biographies to make one small history. To the novelist we are simply what Nabokov called 'psycho-plagiarists.' Yet biographers claim to have thrived on their outcast state. While so much history has been respectably academicised, and even the novel fenced off behind academic theory, the biographer is still free to roam wherever his instinct takes him. A vital literature needs cross-border trading."
(Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography, Basic Books, 2002)
Pronunciation: bi-OG-re-fee
