Autobiography

See also: List of autobiographies and

Category:Autobiographies for examples.

Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote Confessions, the first

Western autobiography ever written, around 400.
Portrait by Philippe de Champaigne, 17th century.
An autobiography (from the Greek, αὐτός-
autos self + βίος-bios life + γράφειν-
graphein to write) is a self-written account
of the life of oneself. The word
"autobiography" was first used
deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in
the English periodical The Monthly Review,
when he suggested the word as a hybrid,
but condemned it as "pedantic". However,
its next recorded use was in its present
sense, by Robert Southey in 1809.[1]
Despite only being named early in the
nineteenth century, first-person
autobiographical writing originates in
antiquity. Roy Pascal differentiates
autobiography from the periodic self-
reflective mode of journal or diary writing
by noting that "[autobiography] is a review
of a life from a particular moment in time,
while the diary, however reflective it may
be, moves through a series of moments in
time".[2] Autobiography thus takes stock of
the autobiographer's life from the moment
of composition. While biographers
generally rely on a wide variety of
documents and viewpoints, autobiography
may be based entirely on the writer's
memory. The memoir form is closely
associated with autobiography but it
tends, as Pascal claims, to focus less on
the self and more on others during the
autobiographer's review of his or her life.[2]

Biography
Life

Autobiographical works are by nature

subjective. The inability—or unwillingness
—of the author to accurately recall
memories has in certain cases resulted in
misleading or incorrect information. Some
sociologists and psychologists have noted
that autobiography offers the author the
ability to recreate history.
Spiritual autobiography

Spiritual autobiography is an account of an

author's struggle or journey towards God,
followed by conversion a religious
conversion, often interrupted by moments
of regression. The author re-frames his or
her life as a demonstration of divine
intention through encounters with the
Divine. The earliest example of a spiritual
autobiography is Augustine's Confessions
though the tradition has expanded to
include other religious traditions in works
such as Zahid Rohari's An Autobiography
and Black Elk Speaks. The spiritual
autobiography works as an endorsement
of his or her religion.

Memoirs

A memoir is slightly different in character

from an autobiography. While an
autobiography typically focuses on the "life
and times" of the writer, a memoir has a
narrower, more intimate focus on his or
her own memories, feelings and emotions.
Memoirs have often been written by
politicians or military leaders as a way to
record and publish an account of their
public exploits. One early example is that
of Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello
Gallico, also known as Commentaries on
the Gallic Wars. In the work, Caesar
describes the battles that took place
during the nine years that he spent fighting
local armies in the Gallic Wars. His second
memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or
Commentaries on the Civil War) is an
account of the events that took place
between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war
against Gnaeus Pompeius and the Senate.

Leonor López de Córdoba (1362–1420)

wrote what is supposed to be the first
autobiography in Spanish. The English
Civil War (1642–1651) provoked a number
of examples of this genre, including works
by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John
Reresby. French examples from the same
period include the memoirs of Cardinal de
Retz (1614–1679) and the Duc de Saint-
Simon.

Fictional autobiography

The term "fictional autobiography"

signifies novels about a fictional character
written as though the character were
writing their own autobiography, meaning
that the character is the first-person
narrator and that the novel addresses both
internal and external experiences of the
character. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders is
an early example. Charles Dickens' David
Copperfield is another such classic, and
J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is a
well-known modern example of fictional
autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane
Eyre is yet another example of fictional
autobiography, as noted on the front page
of the original version. The term may also
apply to works of fiction purporting to be
autobiographies of real characters, e.g.,
Robert Nye's Memoirs of Lord Byron.

Autobiography through the

ages
 This section does not cite any sources.

The classical period: Apologia, oration,

confession

In antiquity such works were typically

entitled apologia, purporting to be self-
justification rather than self-
documentation. John Henry Newman's
Christian confessional work (first
published in 1864) is entitled Apologia Pro
Vita Sua in reference to this tradition.

The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus

introduces his autobiography (Josephi
Vita, c. 99) with self-praise, which is
followed by a justification of his actions as
a Jewish rebel commander of Galilee.[3]

The pagan rhetor Libanius (c. 314–394)

framed his life memoir (Oration I begun in
374) as one of his orations, not of a public
kind, but of a literary kind that could not be
aloud in privacy.

Augustine (354–430) applied the title

Confessions to his autobiographical work,
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the
same title in the 18th century, initiating the
chain of confessional and sometimes racy
and highly self-critical, autobiographies of
the Romantic era and beyond. Augustine's
was arguably the first Western
autobiography ever written, and became
an influential model for Christian writers
throughout the Middle Ages. It tells of the
hedonistic lifestyle Augustine lived for a
time within his youth, associating with
young men who boasted of their sexual
exploits; his following and leaving of the
anti-sex and anti-marriage Manichaeism in
attempts to seek sexual morality; and his
subsequent return to Christianity due to
his embracement of Skepticism and the
New Academy movement (developing the
view that sex is good, and that virginity is
better, comparing the former to silver and
the latter to gold; Augustine's views
subsequently strongly influenced Western
theology[4]). Confessions will always rank
among the great masterpieces of western
literature.[5]

In the spirit of Augustine's Confessions is

the 12th-century Historia Calamitatum of
Peter Abelard, outstanding as an
autobiographical document of its period.

Early autobiographies
A scene from the Baburnama

In the 15th century, Leonor López de

Córdoba, a Spanish noblewoman, wrote
her Memorias, which may be the first
autobiography in Castillian.

Zāhir ud-Dīn Mohammad Bābur, who

founded the Mughal dynasty of South Asia
kept a journal Bāburnāma
(Chagatai/Persian: ‫ ;ﺑﺎﺑﺮ ﻧﺎﻣﮧ‬literally: "Book
of Babur" or "Letters of Babur") which was
written between 1493 and 1529.
One of the first great autobiographies of
the Renaissance is that of the sculptor and
goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571),
written between 1556 and 1558, and
entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life).
He declares at the start: "No matter what
sort he is, everyone who has to his credit
what are or really seem great
achievements, if he cares for truth and
goodness, ought to write the story of his
own life in his own hand; but no one
should venture on such a splendid
undertaking before he is over forty."[6]
These criteria for autobiography generally
persisted until recent times, and most
serious autobiographies of the next three
hundred years conformed to them.

Another autobiography of the period is De

vita propria, by the Italian mathematician,
physician and astrologer Gerolamo
Cardano (1574).

It is often claimed that the earliest known

autobiography in English is the early 15th-
century Book of Margery Kempe,
describing among other things Kempe's
pilgrimage to the Holy Land and visit to
Rome although it is, at best, only a partial
autobiography and arguably more a
memoir of religious experiences. The book
remained in manuscript and was not
published until 1936.

Possibly the first publicly available

autobiography written in English was
Captain John Smith's autobiography
published in 1630[7] which was regarded
by many as not much more than a
collection of tall tales told by someone of
doubtful veracity. This changed with the
publication of Philip Barbour's definitive
biography in 1964 which, amongst other
things, established independent factual
bases for many of Smith's "tall tales",
many of which could not have been known
by Smith at the time of writing unless he
was actually present at the events
recounted.[8]

Other notable English autobiographies of

the 17th century include those of Lord
Herbert of Cherbury (1643, published
1764) and John Bunyan (Grace Abounding
to the Chief of Sinners, 1666).

Jarena Lee (1783–1864) was the first

African American woman to have a
published biography in the United States.[9]

18th and 19th centuries

Cover of the first English edition of Benjamin
Franklin's autobiography, 1793

Following the trend of Romanticism, which

greatly emphasized the role and the nature
of the individual, and in the footsteps of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a
more intimate form of autobiography,
exploring the subject's emotions, came
into fashion. Stendhal's autobiographical
writings of the 1830s, The Life of Henry
Brulard and Memoirs of an Egotist, are
both avowedly influenced by Rousseau.[10]
An English example is William Hazlitt's
Liber Amoris (1823), a painful examination
of the writer's love-life.

With the rise of education, cheap

newspapers and cheap printing, modern
concepts of fame and celebrity began to
develop, and the beneficiaries of this were
not slow to cash in on this by producing
autobiographies. It became the
expectation—rather than the exception—
that those in the public eye should write
about themselves—not only writers such
as Charles Dickens (who also incorporated
autobiographical elements in his novels)
and Anthony Trollope, but also politicians
(e.g. Henry Brooks Adams), philosophers
(e.g. John Stuart Mill), churchmen such as
Cardinal Newman, and entertainers such
as P. T. Barnum. Increasingly, in
accordance with romantic taste, these
accounts also began to deal, amongst
other topics, with aspects of childhood
and upbringing—far removed from the
principles of "Cellinian" autobiography.
20th and 21st centuries

From the 17th century onwards,

"scandalous memoirs" by supposed
libertines, serving a public taste for
titillation, have been frequently published.
Typically pseudonymous, they were (and
are) largely works of fiction written by
ghostwriters. So-called "autobiographies"
of modern professional athletes and
media celebrities—and to a lesser extent
about politicians—generally written by a
ghostwriter, are routinely published. Some
celebrities, such as Naomi Campbell,
admit to not having read their
"autobiographies". Some sensationalist
autobiographies such as James Frey's A
Million Little Pieces have been publicly
exposed as having embellished or
fictionalized significant details of the
authors' lives.

Autobiography has become an

increasingly popular and widely accessible
form. A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey
(1979) has become an Australian literary
classic.[11] With the critical and
commercial success in the United States
of such memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and
The Color of Water, more and more people
have been encouraged to try their hand at
this genre. Maggie Nelson's book The
Argonauts is one of the recent
autobiographies. Maggie Nelson calls it
"autotheory"—a combination of
autobiography and critical theory.[12]

A genre where the "claim for truth"

overlaps with fictional elements though
the work still purports to be
autobiographical is autofiction.

See also
Autobiographical comics
Autobiographical novel
Autobiographical songs
Autofiction
 Biography
I Novel
Letter collection
List of autobiographies
Memoir
Unreliable narrator

References
1. "autobiography", Oxford English
Dictionary
2. Pascal, Roy (1960). Design and Truth
in Autobiography. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
3. Steve Mason, Flavius Josephus:
Translation and Commentary. Life of
Josephus : translation and
commentary, Volume 9
4. Fiorenza and Galvin (1991), p. 317
5. Chadwick, Henry (2008-08-14).
Confessions. Oxford University Press.
pp. 4 (ix). ISBN 9780199537822.
6. Benvenuto Cellini, tr. George Bull, The
Autobiography, London 1966 p. 15.
7. The True Travels, Adventures and
Observations of Captain John Smith
into Europe, Aisa, Africa and America
from Anno Domini 1593 to 1629
 8. Barbour, Philip L. (1964). The Three
Worlds of Captain John Smith,
Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston.
9. Peterson, Carla L. (1998). Doers of
the Word: African-American Women
Speakers and Writers in the North
(1830-1880) . Rutgers University
Press. ISBN 9780813525143.
10. Wood, Michael (1971). Stendhal.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
p. 97. ISBN 978-0801491245.
11. about-australia.com.au, 2010
12. Pearl, Monica B. (2018). "Theory and
the Everyday". Angelaki. 23: 199–203.
doi:10.1080/0969725X.2018.143540
1.

Bibliography
Barros, Carolyn (1998). Autobiography:
Narrative of Transformation. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton (1994). The
Turning Key: Autobiography and the
Subjective Impulse Since 1800.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ferrieux, Robert (2001). L'Autobiographie
en Grande-Bretagne et en Irlande. Paris:
Ellipses. p. 384. ISBN 9782729800215.
Lejeune, Philippe (1989). On
Autobiography. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Olney, James (1998). Memory &
Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing.
Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
Pascal, Roy (1960). Design and Truth in
Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Reynolds, Dwight F., ed. (2001).
Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in
the Arabic Literary Tradition. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Wu, Pey-Yi (1990). The Confucian's
Progress: Autobiographical Writings in
 Traditional China. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.

External links
Quotations related to Autobiography at
Wikiquote
The dictionary definition of
autobiography at Wiktionary

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