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In its modern form, may be taken as writing that purposefully and self‐consciously provides an account of the author's life and incorporates feeling and introspection as well as empirical detail. In this sense, autobiographies are infrequent in English much before 1800. Although there are examples of autobiography in a quasi‐modern sense earlier than this (e.g. Bunyan's conversion narrative, Grace Abounding, 1666, and Margaret Cavendish', duchess of Newcastle's ‘A True Relation’, 1655–6) it is not until the early 19th cent. that the genre becomes established in English writing: Gibbon's Memoirs (1796) are a notable exception.

From 1800 onwards the introspective Protestantism of an earlier period and the Romantic Movement's displeasure with the fact/feeling distinction of the Enlightenment provided for personal narratives of a largely new kind. They were characterized by a self‐scrutiny and vivid sentiment that produced what is now referred to, following Robert Southey (1809), as autobiography . Early in the 19th cent. Wordsworth gives in The Prelude (1805) a sustained reflection upon the circumstances of he himself being the subject of his own work; and in the second half of the century Newman in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) publicly and originally reveals a personal spiritual journey. This latter, with its public disclosure of the private domain, had a dramatic and far‐reaching influence upon the intelligentsia of late Victorian society.

In the 20th cent. autobiography became increasingly valued not so much as an empirical record of historical events but as providing an epitome of personal sensibility among the intricate vicissitudes of cultural change. Vera Brittain achieved a seriousness of observation and affect to provide in Testament of Youth (1933) a major work on the conduct of the First World War. In the area of more domestic but no less social concerns J. R. Ackerley in his My Father and Myself (1968) constructed an autobiography of painful frankness in a disquisition upon his unusual family relations, his affection for his dog, and the tribulations of his homosexuality. More recently Tim Lott in The Scent of Dead Roses (1996) discussed the suicide of his mother and amalgamated autobiography, family history, and social analysis in a virtuoso performance of control and pathos. The truthfulness or not of autobiography is essentially a matter that must be left to biographers and philosophers. The plausibility of an autobiography, however, must find its authentication by the degree to which it can correspond to some approximation of its context.

From:   autobiography   in  The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature »

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Princeton University Library

His 414: life-writing and history: diaries, memoirs and autobiographies.

• Where to Begin

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• Finding Autobiographies in the Library
• Finding and Retrieving Memoirs in Special Collections
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• Last Updated: Dec 15, 2023 4:16 PM
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• Literary Terms
• Autobiography
• Definition & Examples
• When & How to Write Autobiography

I. What is Autobiography?

An autobiography is a self-written life story.

It is different from a  biography , which is the life story of a person written by someone else. Some people may have their life story written by another person because they don’t believe they can write well, but they are still considered an author because they are providing the information. Reading autobiographies may be more interesting than biographies because you are reading the thoughts of the person instead of someone else’s interpretation.

II. Examples of Autobiography

One of the United States’ forefathers wrote prolifically (that means a lot!) about news, life, and common sense. His readings, quotes, and advice are still used today, and his face is on the $100 bill. Benjamin Franklin’s good advice is still used through his sayings, such as “We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” He’s also the one who penned the saying that’s seen all over many schools: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” His autobiography is full of his adventures , philosophy about life, and his wisdom. His autobiography shows us how much he valued education through his anecdotes (stories) of his constant attempts to learn and improve himself. He also covers his many ideas on his inventions and his thoughts as he worked with others in helping the United States become free from England.

III. Types of Autobiography

There are many types of autobiographies. Authors must decide what purpose they have for writing about their lives, and then they can choose the format that would best tell their story. Most of these types all share common goals: helping themselves face an issue by writing it down, helping others overcome similar events, or simply telling their story.

a. Full autobiography (traditional):

This would be the complete life story, starting from birth through childhood, young adulthood, and up to the present time at which the book is being written. Authors might choose this if their whole lives were very different from others and could be considered interesting.

There are many types of memoirs – place, time, philosophic (their theory on life), occupational, etc. A memoir is a snapshot of a person’s life. It focuses on one specific part that stands out as a learning experience or worth sharing.

c. Psychological illness

People who have suffered mental illness of any kind find it therapeutic to write down their thoughts. Therapists are specialists who listen to people’s problems and help them feel better, but many people find writing down their story is also helpful.

d. Confession

Just as people share a psychological illness, people who have done something very wrong may find it helps to write down and share their story. Sharing the story may make one feel he or she is making amends (making things right), or perhaps hopes that others will learn and avoid the same mistake.

e. Spiritual

Spiritual and religious experiences are very personal . However, many people feel that it’s their duty and honor to share these stories. They may hope to pull others into their beliefs or simply improve others’ lives.

f. Overcoming adversity

Unfortunately, many people do not have happy, shining lives. Terrible events such as robberies, assaults, kidnappings, murders, horrific accidents, and life-threatening illnesses are common in some lives. Sharing the story can inspire others while also helping the person express deep emotions to heal.

IV. The Importance of Autobiography

Autobiographies are an important part of history. Being able to read the person’s own ideas and life stories is getting the first-person story versus the third-person (he-said/she-said) version. In journalism, reporters go to the source to get an accurate account of an event. The same is true when it comes to life stories. Reading the story from a second or third source will not be as reliable. The writer may be incorrectly explaining and describing the person’s life events.

Autobiographies are also important because they allow other people in similar circumstances realize that they are not alone. They can be inspiring for those who are facing problems in their lives. For the author, writing the autobiography allows them to heal as they express their feelings and opinions. Autobiographies are also an important part of history.

V. Examples of Autobiography in Literature

A popular autobiography that has lasted almost 100 years is that of Helen Keller. Her life story has been made into numerous movies and plays. Her teacher, Anne Sullivan, has also had her life story written and televised multiple times. Students today still read and learn about this young girl who went blind and deaf at 19 months of age, causing her to also lose her ability to learn to speak. Sullivan’s entrance into Helen’s life when the girl was seven was the turning point. She learned braille and soon became an activist for helping blind and deaf people across the nation. She died in 1968, but her autobiography is still helping others.

Even in the days before my teacher came, I used to feel along the square stiff boxwood hedges, and, guided by the sense of smell, would find the first violets and lilies. There, too, after a fit of temper, I went to find comfort and to hide my hot face in the cool leaves and grass. What joy it was to lose myself in that garden of flowers, to wander happily from spot to spot, until, coming suddenly upon a beautiful vine, I recognized it by its leaves and blossoms, and knew it was the vine which covered the tumble-down summer-house at the farther end of the garden! (Keller).

An autobiography that many middle and high school students read every year is “Night” by Elie Wiesel. His story is also a memoir, covering his teen years as he and his family went from the comfort of their own home to being forced into a Jewish ghetto with other families, before ending up in a Nazi prison camp. His book is not that long, but the details and description he uses brings to life the horrors of Hitler’s reign of terror in Germany during World War II. Students also read “The Diary of Anne Frank,” another type of autobiography that shows a young Jewish girl’s daily life while hiding from the Nazis to her eventual capture and death in a German camp. Both books are meant to remind us to not be indifferent to the world’s suffering and to not allow hate to take over.

“The people were saying, “The Red Army is advancing with giant strides…Hitler will not be able to harm us, even if he wants to…” Yes, we even doubted his resolve to exterminate us. Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means? In the middle of the twentieth century! And thus my elders concerned themselves with all manner of things—strategy, diplomacy, politics, and Zionism—but not with their own fate. Even Moishe the Beadle had fallen silent. He was weary of talking. He would drift through synagogue or through the streets, hunched over, eyes cast down, avoiding people’s gaze. In those days it was still possible to buy emigration certificates to Palestine. I had asked my father to sell everything, to liquidate everything, and to leave” (Wiesel 8).  

VI. Examples of Autobiography in Pop Culture

One example of an autobiography that was a hit in the movie theaters is “American Sniper,” the story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. According to an article in the Dallas, Texas, magazine D, Kyle donated all the proceeds from the film to veterans and their families. He had a story to tell, and he used it to help others. His story is a memoir, focusing on a specific time period of his life when he was overseas in the military.

An autobiography by a young Olympian is “Grace, Gold and Glory: My Leap of Faith” by Gabrielle (Gabby) Douglas. She had a writer, Michelle Burford, help her in writing her autobiography. This is common for those who have a story to tell but may not have the words to express it well. Gabby was the darling of the 2012 Olympics, winning gold medals for the U.S. in gymnastics along with being the All-Around Gold Medal winner, the first African-American to do so. Many young athletes see her as an inspiration. Her story also became a television movie, “The Gabby Douglas Story.”

VII. Related Terms

The life story of one person written by another. The purpose may to be highlight an event or person in a way to help the public learn a lesson, feel inspired, or to realize that they are not alone in their circumstance. Biographies are also a way to share history. Historic and famous people may have their biographies written by many authors who research their lives years after they have died.

VIII. Conclusion

Autobiographies are a way for people to share stories that may educate, inform, persuade, or inspire others. Many people find writing their stories to be therapeutic, healing them beyond what any counseling might do or as a part of the counseling. Autobiographies are also a way to keep history alive by allowing people in the present learn about those who lived in the past. In the future, people can learn a lot about our present culture by reading autobiographies by people of today.

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Autobiography

Definition of autobiography.

Autobiography is one type of biography , which tells the life story of its author, meaning it is a written record of the author’s life. Rather than being written by somebody else, an autobiography comes through the person’s own pen, in his own words. Some autobiographies are written in the form of a fictional tale; as novels or stories that closely mirror events from the author’s real life. Such stories include Charles Dickens ’ David Copperfield  and J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye . In writing about personal experience, one discovers himself. Therefore, it is not merely a collection of anecdotes – it is a revelation to the readers about the author’s self-discovery.

Difference between Autobiography and Memoir

In an autobiography, the author attempts to capture important elements of his life. He not only deals with his career, and growth as a person, he also uses emotions and facts related to family life, relationships, education, travels, sexuality, and any types of inner struggles. A memoir is a record of memories and particular events that have taken place in the author’s life. In fact, it is the telling of a story or an event from his life; an account that does not tell the full record of a life.

Six Types of Autobiography

There are six types of autobiographies:

• Autobiography: A personal account that a person writes himself/herself.
• Memoir : An account of one’s memory.
• Reflective Essay : One’s thoughts about something.
• Confession: An account of one’s wrong or right doings.
• Monologue : An address of one’s thoughts to some audience or interlocuters.
• Biography : An account of the life of other persons written by someone else.

Importance of Autobiography

Autobiography is a significant genre in literature. Its significance or importance lies in authenticity, veracity, and personal testimonies. The reason is that people write about challenges they encounter in their life and the ways to tackle them. This shows the veracity and authenticity that is required of a piece of writing to make it eloquent, persuasive, and convincing.

Examples of Autobiography in Literature

Example #1:  the box: tales from the darkroom by gunter grass.

A noble laureate and novelist, Gunter Grass , has shown a new perspective of self-examination by mixing up his quilt of fictionalized approach in his autobiographical book, “The Box: Tales from the Darkroom.” Adopting the individual point of view of each of his children, Grass narrates what his children think about him as their father and a writer. Though it is really an experimental approach, due to Grass’ linguistic creativity and dexterity, it gains an enthralling momentum.

Example #2:  The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

In her autobiography, The Story of My Life , Helen Keller recounts her first twenty years, beginning with the events of the childhood illness that left her deaf and blind. In her childhood, a writer sent her a letter and prophesied, “Someday you will write a great story out of your own head that will be a comfort and help to many.”

In this book, Keller mentions prominent historical personalities, such as Alexander Graham Bell, whom she met at the age of six, and with whom she remained friends for several years. Keller paid a visit to John Greenleaf Whittier , a famous American poet, and shared correspondence with other eminent figures, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Mrs. Grover Cleveland. Generally, Keller’s autobiography is about overcoming great obstacles through hard work and pain.

Example #3:  Self Portraits: Fictions by Frederic Tuten

In his autobiography, “Self Portraits: Fictions ,” Frederic Tuten has combined the fringes of romantic life with reality. Like postmodern writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, the stories of Tuten skip between truth and imagination, time and place, without warning. He has done the same with his autobiography, where readers are eager to move through fanciful stories about train rides, circus bears, and secrets to a happy marriage; all of which give readers glimpses of the real man.

Example #4:  My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard

Reliving the success of his literary career through the lens of the many prizes he has received, Thomas Bernhard presents a sarcastic commentary in his autobiography, “My Prizes.” Bernhard, in fact, has taken a few things too seriously. Rather, he has viewed his life as a farcical theatrical drama unfolding around him. Although Bernhard is happy with the lifestyle and prestige of being an author, his blasé attitude and scathing wit make this recollection more charmingly dissident and hilarious.

Example #5:  The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

“The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin ” is written by one of the founding fathers of the United States. This book reveals Franklin’s youth, his ideas, and his days of adversity and prosperity. He is one of the best examples of living the American dream – sharing the idea that one can gain financial independence, and reach a prosperous life through hard work.

Through autobiography, authors can speak directly to their readers, and to their descendants. The function of the autobiography is to leave a legacy for its readers. By writing an autobiography, the individual shares his triumphs and defeats, and lessons learned, allowing readers to relate and feel motivated by inspirational stories. Life stories bridge the gap between peoples of differing ages and backgrounds, forging connections between old and new generations.

Synonyms of Autobiography

The following words are close synonyms of autobiography such as life story, personal account, personal history, diary, journal, biography, or memoir.

Related posts:

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X

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(page 1) p. 1 Introduction

• Published: July 2018
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Autobiography continues to be one of the most popular forms of writing, produced by authors from across the social and professional spectrum. It is also central to the work of literary critics, philosophers, historians, and psychologists, who have found in autobiographies not only an understanding of the ways in which lives have been lived, but the most fundamental accounts of what it means to be a self in the world. The Introduction describes what autobiography means and compares it to other forms of ‘life-writing’. Autobiographical writing is seen to act as a window on to concepts of self, identity, and subjectivity, and into the ways in which these are themselves determined by time and circumstance.

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How to Define Autobiography

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

An autobiography is an account of a person's life written or otherwise recorded by that person. Adjective: autobiographical .

Many scholars regard the Confessions (c. 398) by Augustine of Hippo (354–430) as the first autobiography.

The term fictional autobiography (or pseudoautobiography ) refers to novels that employ first-person narrators who recount the events of their lives as if they actually happened. Well-known examples include David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens and Salinger's  The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

Some critics believe that all autobiographies are in some ways fictional. Patricia Meyer Spacks has observed that "people do make themselves up. . . . To read an autobiography is to encounter a self as an imaginative being" ( The Female Imagination , 1975).

For the distinction between a memoir and an autobiographical composition, see memoir  as well as the examples and observations below. 

From the Greek, "self" + "life" + "write"

Examples of Autobiographical Prose

• Imitating the Style of the Spectator , by Benjamin Franklin
• Langston Hughes on Harlem
• On the Street, by Emma Goldman
• Ritual in Maya Angelou's Caged Bird
• The Turbid Ebb and Flow of Misery, by Margaret Sanger
• Two Ways of Seeing a River, by Mark Twain

Examples and Observations of Autobiographical Compositions

• "An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing." (Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant , 1968)
• "Putting a life into words rescues it from confusion even when the words declare the omnipresence of confusion, since the art of declaring implies dominance." (Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England . Harvard University Press, 1976)
• The Opening Lines of Zora Neale Hurston's Autobiography - "Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say. "So you will have to know something about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life. "I was born in a Negro town. I do not mean by that the black back-side of an average town. Eatonville, Florida, is, and was at the time of my birth, a pure Negro town--charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all. It was not the first Negro community in America, but it was the first to be incorporated, the first attempt at organized self-government on the part of Negroes in America. "Eatonville is what you might call hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick. The town was not in the original plan. It is a by-product of something else. . . ." (Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road . J.B. Lippincott, 1942) - "There is a saying in the Black community that advises: 'If a person asks you where you're going, you tell him where you've been. That way you neither lie nor reveal your secrets.' Hurston had called herself the 'Queen of the Niggerati.' She also said, 'I like myself when I'm laughing.' Dust Tracks on a Road is written with royal humor and an imperious creativity. But then all creativity is imperious, and Zora Neale Hurston was certainly creative." (Maya Angelou, Foreword to Dust Tracks on a Road , rpt. HarperCollins, 1996)
• Autobiography and Truth "All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies; I mean deliberate lies. No man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime, involving, as it must, the truth about his family and friends and colleagues. And no man is good enough to tell the truth in a document which he suppresses until there is nobody left alive to contradict him." (George Bernard Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches , 1898)" " Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people." (attributed to Thomas Carlyle, Philip Guedalla, and others)
• Autobiography and Memoir - "An autobiography is the story of a life : the name implies that the writer will somehow attempt to capture all the essential elements of that life. A writer's autobiography, for example, is not expected to deal merely with the author's growth and career as a writer but also with the facts and emotions connected to family life, education, relationships, sexuality, travels, and inner struggles of all kinds. An autobiography is sometimes limited by dates (as in Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949 by Doris Lessing), but not obviously by theme. "Memoir, on the other hand, is a story from a life . It makes no pretense of replicating a whole life." (Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art . Eighth Mountain Press, 2002) - "Unlike autobiography , which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer's life that was unusually vivid, such as childhood or adolescence, or that was framed by war or travel or public service or some other special circumstance." (William Zinsser, "Introduction," Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir . Mariner Books, 1998)
• An "Epidemical Rage for Auto-Biography" "[I]f the populace of writers become thus querulous after fame (to which they have no pretensions) we shall expect to see an epidemical rage for auto-biography break out, more wide in its influence and more pernicious in its tendency than the strange madness of the Abderites, so accurately described by Lucian. London, like Abdera, will be peopled solely by 'men of genius'; and as the frosty season, the grand specific for such evils, is over, we tremble for the consequences. Symptoms of this dreadful malady (though somewhat less violent) have appeared amongst us before . . .." (Isaac D'Israeli, "Review of "The Memoirs of Percival Stockdale," 1809)|
• The Lighter Side of Autobiography - "The Confessions of St. Augustine are the first autobiography , and they have this to distinguish them from all other autobiographies, that they are addressed directly to God." (Arthur Symons, Figures of Several Centuries , 1916) - "I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography , I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or isn't." (Philip Roth, Deception , 1990) - "I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography ." (Steven Wright)

Pronunciation: o-toe-bi-OG-ra-fee

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autobiography

[ aw-t uh -bahy- og -r uh -fee , -bee- , aw-toh- ]

• a history of a person's life written or told by that person.

/ ˌɔːtəʊbaɪˈɒɡrəfɪ; ˌɔːtəbaɪ- /

• an account of a person's life written or otherwise recorded by that person
• A literary work about the writer's own life. and Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa are autobiographical.

Discover More

Derived forms.

• ˌautobiˈographer , noun

Other Words From

• auto·bi·ogra·pher noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of autobiography 1

Example Sentences

In so doing, she gave us an autobiography that has held up for more than a century.

His handwritten autobiography reawakens in Lee a longing to know her motherland.

His elocution, perfected on stage and evident in television and film, make X’s autobiography an easy yet informative listen.

The book is not so much an autobiography of Hastings — or even Netflix’s origin story.

By contrast, Shing-Tung Yau says in his autobiography that the Calabi-Yau manifold was given its name by other people eight years after he proved its existence, which Eugenio Calabi had conjectured some 20 years before that.

Glow: The Autobiography of Rick JamesRick James David Ritz (Atria Books) Where to begin?

Hulanicki was the subject of a 2009 documentary, Beyond Biba, based on her 2007 autobiography From A to Biba.

And it was also during the phase of the higher autobiography.

“Nighttime was the worst,” Bennett wrote in his autobiography.

Then I picked up a book that shredded my facile preconceptions—Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young.

No; her parents had but small place in that dramatic autobiography that Daphne was now constructing for herself.

His collected works, with autobiography, were published in 1865 under the editorship of Charles Hawkins.

But there is one point about the book that deserves some considering, its credibility as autobiography.

I thought you were anxious for leisure to complete your autobiography.

The smallest fragment of a genuine autobiography seems to me valuable for the student of past epochs.

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Teaching Innovations

Biography and Autobiography in the Teaching of History and Social Studies

Ann K. Warren | Jan 1, 1992

I have been using biography and autobiography to teach history at Case Western Reserve University for the past ten years. I regularly teach a class called "Biography as History: Twentieth-Century World Leaders," and occasionally I offer a class called "Medieval People" (the medieval period is really my field). Currently I am developing a new survey course in modern world history in which I anticipate extensive use of biographical and autobiographical materials. Quite clearly, I'm a believer.

Using biography in the classroom is both academically valid and a challenging way to encounter new worlds. For teachers, biography and autobiography provide initial entry to the study of periods of time and of places with which there may be little familiarity. For students, it is pleasurable, hardly like work, to learn history by reading the life stories of real people. It makes these people—whether they be monarchs, presidents, slaves, colonials, or their masters, prisoners of conscience or fighting clergy—accessible and knowable.

It is gratifying to be able to report to those of us who are interested in biography that there has been an explosion of new materials in recent years. Teachers and students alike can enjoy marvelously written books that simultaneously teach and delight. The authors of these books have engaged in a broad range of historical inquiry and then have linked their approaches to narrative structures that entice the student-reader to enter a complex world with minimal anxiety. In some measure the new upsurge of biographical literature is a corrective to the recent past, during which it was the historical fashion to deride "Great Man" theories, to minimize the role of the individual agency in history, and to downgrade the narrative. While the "new social history" has enriched our perspectives beyond measure (and I consider myself a social historian), broader views of events remain compelling, especially as teaching tools, and I welcome both the return of the narrative and of the individual to historical writing and reflection.

Biography, both written and visual (in the form of films and videos), can be used to teach a broad range of subjects while maintaining a focus on persons. We can discover that Malcolm X's Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 1979) is quite a good way to introduce the subject of race relations in the United States in the 1960s; that the life story of Charles Darwin tells us more about Victorian England than about evolution; that a biography or a film about Eleanor Roosevelt takes us clear through the first seventy years of this American century; that one of Peter the Great or of Catherine the Great serves as a good introduction to contemporary Russian history. We can study China with a reading of Frank Ching's Ancestors: 900 Years in the Life of a Chinese Family (New York: William Morrow, 1988). We can also consider that a man like Eric Erikson will give us a special picture of Martin Luther or of Mohandas Gandhi, and that there are as many interpretations of Hitler as there are books about him.

Having made something of an argument for the profitability and legitimacy of using biography as a historical teaching tool, let me divide my further remarks into three sections: commenting first on the courses I have taught to college undergraduates; second, addressing some of the theoretical questions that underlie the use of this kind of material; and finally, discussing the usefulness of biographical and other narrative material as an adjunct in teaching world history.

The class I most regularly teach is "Biography as History: Twentieth-Century World Leaders." It is a freshman-level course, but not a requirement or part of the Case Western Reserve University core curriculum. It is attractive to liberal arts students in general and useful to engineering majors for fulfilling their humanities requirements. Non-history students are not afraid to take the class—it seems like it will be easy. Afterwards, when it turns out to have been more work than they anticipated, they nonetheless admit that they both enjoyed it and learned a lot.

I inherited the course from David Van Tassel who had in turn participated in such a class as an undergraduate at Dartmouth. Van Tassel used the format largely to explore recent American, European, and Asian history by using the biographies of the political heads of specific countries. I dropped the United States from the range of areas of my interest—my own ignorance not the least of my reasons, but also because students are most familiar here and I was anxious to explore the less familiar. I altered the format both by moving into Latin America and Africa and also by expanding the notion of leadership. Over the years my classes have studied Mao, Mohandas Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Fidel Castro, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, and regularly Hitler and Stalin. Investigating an alternative type of leadership one semester, we read Peter Hebblethwaite's Pope John XXIII (New York: Doubleday, 1987). It was a great idea but it was a pedagogical disaster. The book was scholarly but too complex; more than that, the great changes that Vatican II would set in motion came after John's death. And so to my students the book seemed little more than a long story about how an unlikely man became pope. I still believe that the idea of examining a renewed papacy as a center of power and as a source of leadership in the twentieth century is a good one. It is a way to get at important forces within the century that have a different dimension from the purely political. I have recently read a review of Keepers of the Keys. John XXIII, Paul IV and John Paul II: Three Who Changed the Church by Wilton Wynn (New York: Random House, 1989). I have yet to see it, but I am tantalized to try again.

Typically, in teaching the class I have scheduled four or five units, each essentially distinct, with short exams or papers at the end of each unit and a final exam question that ties things together in some fashion. Case Western Reserve is on a semester basis and there are about fourteen weeks of class time. The units run from two to four weeks, based on their complexity and on the amount of assigned reading material. One problem in the use of biographies is that many of the best are extremely long. More on this subject later.

The course begins with a discussion of the meaning of leadership, of charisma, and of the relationship between leadership and power. I ask my students to list who they think are the most important people of the twentieth century and we analyze their choices. Most lists are predictable. Few if any students ever mention a woman's name. After a couple of background lectures (Industrial Revolution, World War I), we move into the first unit. Students read a full-length biography of a "leader," perhaps John Toland's Hitler (abridged version and still 700 pages, New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), or Isaac Deutscher's Stalin (2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) or Geoffrey Ashe's Gandhi (New York: Stein and Day, 1968). In addition, I hand out supplementary readings that enrich the text or provide alternate interpretations. As students are doing their reading I use the class to develop and reinforce context. In a recent Hitler unit I lectured not only on German history but also on racism, on totalitarianism, and on individual responsibility and guilt. I discuss recent trends in German scholarship and the "war of the German historians." I discuss psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations of Hitler's behavior and query their relevance. I show films: The Wannsee Conference , Night and Fog , The Nuremberg Trials . I schedule visiting lecturers with firsthand experience. Sometimes we use small-group discussions based on the extra readings. Students who are shy in the larger class often will open up in a circle of six or seven. At the end of the unit students take a quiz that essentially tests the level of their reading of the biography. The quiz is to keep students honest. I assume that if students do the reading, come to class, and participate in the frequent class discussions, they will learn a great deal.

This past term I altered my organization of the class. I reduced the number of units to three, in this case Germany, the U.S.S.R., and South Africa, and assigned two books for each unit—one on a "leader" and one on a "follower" as it were, a more typical citizen. In addition to biographies of Hitler, Stalin, and Winnie Mandela, students read In Hitler's Germany (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), by Bernt Engelmann, a man who survived those years morally and helped others to survive physically; they read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (New York: Ballantine, 1971); and they read Kaffir Boy (New York: New American Library, 1986) by Mark Mathabane, a young South African black now living in the United States. In effect, these books were autobiographies (technically, one was a memoir, one a fictionalized life-account, and Mathabane's alone a "true" autobiography), counterbalancing the political biographies of the leaders. In addition, we had time for more films, including Cry Freedom , about Steve Biko, and the film version of Ivan Denisovich . Visiting speakers included both a black South African student and a faculty member who had escaped from German-occupied Poland to the U.S.S.R. as a child during World War II.

The class was very successful. The extra time in each unit gave us the opportunity to talk about issues. The partial focus on "everyday people" (something drawn from the "new social history") personalized the learning process in a concrete way. In other terms I had tried to use books of ordinary people without the leader book. That had not worked—there was not enough background for the student in the assigned text and it was too difficult to give it all myself in class. But together the leader/follower texts were mutually reinforcing. Students took quizzes as usual on the leader texts and wrote papers on the "people" biographies. With Ivan Denisovich , students were able to discuss both the use of fiction as history and to compare two different media. They all agreed that the book was far better than the movie, that the movie would have been difficult to comprehend without first having read the novel, but that doing both significantly enhanced the evoked images. I will use this format again. Its only drawback was that it limited the range of topics.

A difficulty implicit in the biographical approach is that it perforce commits a considerable piece of students' time to one project. In many classes there just will not be time for students to read full-fledged biographies. Excerpts sometimes work, although I find them less than satisfactory. Better still is a book such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Common Ground , by J. Anthony Lukas (New York: Knopf, 1986). It uses a biographical format to discuss the effects of the Boston Public School desegregation case. Individual chapters deal with three affected families, one black, one WASP, one Irish-Catholic, and each begins with an extended historical sketch of where these people came from and how they ended up in Boston in the mid-twentieth century. There are also chapters on Arthur Garrity, the federal court judge, on Louise Day Hicks, the chair of the Boston School Committee, on Kevin White, the mayor, on the archbishop, later cardinal, Humberto Medeiros, and on Tom Winshop, the editor of the Boston Globe . Other players in the story are also portrayed in historical context and from a biographical perspective. I could anticipate using such a text with students reading different chapters, taking on the roles of their specific characters, and then discussing their positions based on who they are before a class. I think this could be a profoundly meaningful learning experience.

In general, when I would like to use a life story in class and cannot find the time for students to read a whole biography, I read it and use a class period to tell the story. In a unit on Stalin I give biographical sketches both of Lenin and of Trotsky. Not only does this flesh out the references to these people in the text students are reading, but it shows students how varied were the backgrounds of people who came together in the Russian revolutionary period. I have given mini-biographic lectures of Churchill and Roosevelt when discussing Stalin at Yalta, of Mussolini and Franco in a Hitler unit, of Zhou Enlai and Chiang Kai-shek when learning about Mao. In my medieval classes I explore the lives of Alfred the Great, Eleanor of Aquitaine, St. Francis, Margery Kempe—real and whole people.

Thus far I have been stressing the ways in which biography can facilitate the learning process. Now let me issue some caveats. Using biography in the classroom is not really an easy way into murky waters. In fact, it is a technique that introduces highly charged and opinionated perspectives into the classroom. Biographies are laden with inferences and difficulties that can be surmounted only if one is well aware they exist. It is important to understand the kinds of material we are using when we select particular biographies as well as the biographical approach in general. Even more than in a traditional text, we must face up to the realization that we are not feeding our students "facts." Biography is very subjective material and autobiography, by definition, even more so. "As a Freudian," writes Bruno Bettelheim in the introduction to his new book, Freud's Vienna and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1989), "I believe what Freud said about biographies applies even more to autobiographies, namely that the person who undertakes such a task 'binds himself to lying, to concealment, to flummery.'" Philip Roth, after a longtime literary career of fictionalized autobiographical writing, has recently published The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (New York: Penguin, 1988). I leave it to you to query whether greater truth will be found in his fiction or in his Facts .

When we use biography and autobiography, therefore, we must give students the chance and the tools whereby they can make judgments about what they read. To do this we must ourselves develop a level of sophistication about these texts and insure that as interpreters we have established a basis on which to examine and analyze them. As teachers we need to be cognizant of critical approaches to this seemingly innocent material and to be competent to perceive the specific goals, approaches, perspectives, styles, limitations, and prejudices of different biographers and biographies. Furthermore, we need to examine, explore, and weigh the sources of biographies and autobiographies: the nature of the archival evidence, the letters, oral history, psychodynamic analysis, even the gossip.

There are good available resources to help us do this. The Journal of American History (March 1989) devoted an issue to the theme of "History and Memory," with excellent contributions, among others, by David Lowenthal (pp. 1263–80), David Thelen (pp. 1117–29), and Michael Frisch (pp. 1130–55). David Lowenthal's The Past Is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) is a treasure, with pages 210–38 specifically discussing history. Donald Ostrowski, in "The Historian and the Virtual Past," Historian 51 (1989): 201–20, also addresses the ambiguities inherent in trying to reconstruct any past.

More specifically in terms of biography and autobiography, James Olney has edited a fine volume of essays, Studies in Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), and William McKinley Runyan has given us Life Histories and Psychobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Also dealing with psychobiography are Charles Strozier and Daniel Offer, eds., The Leader: Psychohistorical Essays (New York: Plenum Press, 1985). With regard to the use of film as history, the American Historical Review (93 [1988]: 1173–1227) published a series of articles, and Robert Brent Toplin's reviews in Perspectives are eagerly awaited. The general media also are calling upon scholars to criticize the accuracy and legitimacy of "historical" films. Readers of The New York Times , The New Republic , The New York Review , and other resources, find in them competent analyses of recent films.

Space does not allow me to explore this material in any detail, but let me here make just two comments. A remarkable chapter in Olney's Studies is G. Thomas Couser's "Black Elk Speaks with Forked Tongue" (pp. 77–88). Couser points out all the pitfalls both "as told to stories" and also of cross-cultural forays. Furthermore, he profoundly challenges what has been considered one of the most successful of these attempts. The article raises many important questions.

With regard to the thorny question of psychobiography, Runyan's volume, Life Histories and Psychobiography , is a useful text. My perspective as a teacher is to point out how highly psychological almost every biography is—in fact, if it is not psychologically interpretive, we tend to feel it as flat, incomplete. We are so used to psychological interpretation these days that we notice it in its absence rather than in its presence. Train yourself and your students to be attentive to those interpretations that fall most naturally and gracefully upon the page.

Psychobiography is another thing. I recently gave my students two extra readings on Hitler, one on a psychological discussion of his "infantilism," the other a psychoanalytic comparison of Hitler and Gandhi in terms of their relationships with their mothers. My students were interested, even fascinated with the material, but ultimately rejected it as irrelevant to larger questions of authority, guilt, and responsibility. They did not want Hitler "explained away." I believe psychobiography is of more value to people in the field of mental health than to historians; and that while it may answer some of our questions, the road down which it takes us is so individualized as to be of modest use to historians in our larger endeavors.

Let me conclude with a reaffirmation of the helpfulness of biography, autobiography, and fiction (which is often autobiography) in the teaching of world history or Third World history classes. Nothing gives more insight to students than to discern both the connections and the dissimilarities between their lives and the lives of others in places and/or times that seem remote and somehow unreal. Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are places that are outside the experience of most of my students. Biography, autobiography, and fiction are gentle ways by which the seemingly alien can be incorporated and absorbed. Creative use of biography, moreover, can enable one to graft ethnic, gender, and religious issues onto political and geographical ones, and to do comparative studies. I have been awaiting an opportunity to teach a unit in which I could contrast Eleanor Roosevelt (or Nancy Reagan) with Jehan Sadat, Winnie Mandela, or Madame Pandit. What a chance to talk about derived power, about women, about cultures and race.

To sum up, biography and autobiography in all their guises make first-rate teaching tools, In the long view, students are likely to remember the outline of a person's life long after the sequence of political events has become muddled. In the short term, they become engaged and willingly enter into an interactive process. "What would you have done?" is a question I often ask during class. Dealing as they have with real people whom they have come to know after a fashion, students give credible answers. They can put themselves in another's place. Biography, autobiography, and good fiction help students understand not that nothing changes or that all people are the same, and not that disparate cultures can be reduced to a few universals, but rather that some things can be comprehended about almost anyone in however distant the past or however exotic the culture. Stories of men and women make good history.

—Ann K. Warren is an adjunct associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University.

Tags: Teaching Resources and Strategies

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Definition of biography

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So You've Been Asked to Submit a Biography

In a library, the word biography refers both to a kind of book and to a section where books of that kind are found. Each biography tells the story of a real person's life. A biography may be about someone who lived long ago, recently, or even someone who is still living, though in the last case it must necessarily be incomplete. The term autobiography refers to a biography written by the person it's about. Autobiographies are of course also necessarily incomplete.

Sometimes biographies are significantly shorter than a book—something anyone who's been asked to submit a biography for, say, a conference or a community newsletter will be glad to know. Often the word in these contexts is shortened to bio , a term that can be both a synonym of biography and a term for what is actually a biographical sketch: a brief description of a person's life. These kinds of biographies—bios—vary, but many times they are only a few sentences long. Looking at bios that have been used in the same context can be a useful guide in determining what to put in your own.

Examples of biography in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'biography.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Late Greek biographia , from Greek bi- + -graphia -graphy

1665, in the meaning defined at sense 2

Dictionary Entries Near biography

biographize

Cite this Entry

“Biography.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biography. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.

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Meet the ‘pursuer of nubile young females’ who helped pass Arizona’s 1864 abortion law

The arizona supreme court has decided the law is still relevant. so let’s talk about the guy who led the body that passed it..

The time has come to reflect on the life and times — especially the times — of William Claude Jones.

Jones was a “prevaricator, a poet, a politician and the pursuer of nubile young females,” according to a 1990 article published in the Journal of Arizona History, which appears to be the most comprehensive biographical report published on the life of the 19th-century rogue.

His pursuit of such nubility began with a marriage to Sarah Freeman, who bore him two children in the 1840s, when Jones would have been in his 20s or early 30s. He was a sitting member of the Missouri state legislature at the time, but his family followed him to Arkansas and then Texas as he searched for more prominent government appointments. In 1854, President Franklin Pierce eventually named him U.S. attorney for the New Mexico territory, and it was hereabout that Jones’s first wife filed for divorce.

His next wife was a girl whose name was believed to be Maria v. del Refugio, writes L. Boyd Finch, the author of the journal article. New Mexico’s delegate to Washington, Miguel Otero, was bothered by the union. He “declared that the bride was twelve years old,” Finch writes, “and that Jones had ‘abducted’ her.” Otero petitioned President James Buchanan to fire Jones for the moral failing, but Jones resigned instead.

No matter! The mid-19th century was, by any standard you or I would recognize, a hideous place for women. The predatory relationship did not end Jones’s political career; he merely moved farther west, to the Arizona territory. There, Jones supported secession from the Southern states in the impending Civil War. He also landed upon his third wife, Caroline Stephens, who was 15 years old. Claude, by this time, was around 50.

Ah, well. They were married for only a year, anyway, because in 1865, Finch writes, Jones “left Caroline. She never saw or heard from him again.”

He had boarded a train for California, and then a boat for Hawaii, where he again entered local politics, winning a seat in the kingdom’s lower house. By 1868, a local girl named MaeMae Kailihao — “reportedly a princess from a noble family” — was pregnant with his child. She was 14.

Jones and Kailihao married and had several children together until she died at the age of 28 in 1881. Then Jones wed for a fifth time, a woman named Mary Akina — age unknown — only to file for divorce two years later. Shortly after that, Jones died on the island of Maui.

Finch, Jones’s biographer, is careful to say that there is a lot about W. Claude Jones’s life that has been lost to time. We know very little about his early upbringing, or how much he might have exaggerated some of the military exploits he was known to boast about. We also, it almost goes without saying, know very little about his wives, their inner lives, and what they thought of their unions and the times they lived in.

By now you are probably wondering why in God’s name I am writing about this lecherous caricature of a man — a man whose compatriots in the 19th century recognized that he was problematic.

Here’s why:

While Jones lived in Arizona, he was elected to represent Tucson in the 1st Arizona Territorial Legislative Assembly. And then, when that legislature convened in 1864, he was elected speaker of the House.

And it was that legislature — the one Jones presided over in 1864, after he had already abandoned his first wife, and married a 12-year-old and was just weeks away from marrying a 15-year-old, though still a few years away from marrying a 14-year-old — it was that legislature that passed a law reading, “Every person who shall administer or cause to be administered or taken, any medicinal substances, or shall use or cause to be used any instruments whatever, with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child, and shall be thereof duly convicted, shall be punished by imprisonment in the Territorial prison for a term not less than two years nor more than five years.”

And it was that piece of legislation that, earlier this week, was reinstated as law of the land in Arizona. It represents a near-total ban on abortion in the state. The state’s Supreme Court voted 4-2 that the 160-year-old law, put into place nearly five decades before Arizona was a state, should supersede the previous rule, which guarded the right to an abortion up to 15 weeks’ gestation. The new — and by new, I mean very old — law is scheduled to go into effect in two weeks’ time.

William Claude Jones sauntered into the wide expanse of a Southwestern territory more than 150 years ago, and this man’s morals are now the benchmark for the reproductive rights of the 7 million people who live in Arizona. Good night.

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