autobiography - Notable autobiographies, Secondary literature

A narrative of a life written by the subject. There are examples from antiquity in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (2nd-c) and the Confessions of St Augustine (4th-c), and some remarkable early modern instances, such as the arresting autobiography by Benvenuto Cellini (c.1560) and the self-searching Essays of Montaigne (from 1580). The 17th-c puritan ‘spiritual autobiography’ influenced the early novel. However, autobiography proper implies a self-creation as well as self-criticism on the part of the author, and as such is a post-Romantic art (the term was first used by Southey in 1809), though heralded by Rousseau's Confessions (1781–8). Among celebrated autobiographers are Goethe, de Quincey, Stendhal, Benjamin Franklin, George Sand, Hector Berlioz, J S Mill, Ulysses S Grant, Anthony Trollope, T E Lawrence, Robert Graves, H G Wells, and Leonard Woolf. Among novelists who have successfully borrowed the autobiographical form of confession is Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847).

An autobiography, from the Greek auton, 'self', bios, 'life' and graphein, 'write', is a biography written by the subject or composed conjointly with a collaborative writer (styled "as told to" or "with"). an autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. John Henry Newman's autobiography is his Apologia pro vita sua. Augustine applied the title Confessions to his autobiographical work (and Jean-Jacques Rousseau took up the same title). Probably the most famous German autobiography is still Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the first secular biography published in the United States, served as a model for subsequent American autobiographies. African-American autobiography has developed from slave narratives. DuBois both published autobiographies.

A memoir is slightly different from an autobiography. This kind of memoir refers to the idea in ancient Greece and Rome, that memoirs were like "memos," pieces of unfinished and unpublished writing which a writer might use as a memory aid to make a more finished document later on. Although the term "memoir" may have begun to replace "autobiography" in its popular usage, the former term applies to a work more restrictive in scope.

Until the last 20 years or so, few people without some degree of fame tried to write and publish a memoir.

Paul Delaney has coined the term "ad hoc autobiography" to describe an autobiography motivated by the desire to exploit some temporary notoriety. Such autobiographies, often written by a ghostwriter, are routinely published on the lives of professional athletes and media celebrities—and to a lesser extent about politicians. Some celebrities admit to not having read their "autobiographies."

Mark Twain was probably the first popular person to include photography in his autobiography.

Notable autobiographies

(in addition to those referenced in the article)

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907 Roald Dahl, Boy & Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, 1728 Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 1869 Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1821 Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1927 and 1929 Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs, 1885 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861 Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, 1903 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 1873 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1966 Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1966-76 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Les Confessions), 1770, published 1782 Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, 1967, 1969 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, 1964 Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought, 1933 Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 1931 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Washington, Up From Slavery, 1901 Frank Lloyd Wright, Autobiography, 1943 Richard Wright, Black Boy, 1945 Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965 William Butler Yeats, Autobiography, 1936 Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, 1917

Secondary literature

Barros, Carolyn A. "Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation". "The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse Since 1800". Mostern, Kenneth: "Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America", New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. "Design and Truth in Autobiography".