We are obviously curious about his entire life when a person is famous for some accomplishment or talent or for some role he has held. We want to learn about his family and history, and the external influences on his life, as well as about his personal growth and career. This curiosity is attractive to the biographer.
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| Chinese woodcut (1486) from a book of stories about Buddha. |
One of the earliest biographers in what is now Greece was Plutarch (about 46-120 A.D.), a native of Boeotia. He drew a comparison between the lives of prominent Greek and Roman people, taking as founders of states, for example, Theseus and Romulus; Alexander and Julius Caesar, as army leaders; and two great orators, Demosthenes and Cicero. The intention of Plutarch was to view his subjects as symbols of virtue and sin, but he also became interested in them as human beings. He allowed these people to survive by using character-revealing anecdotes, and by explaining physical characteristics.
Many of the saints' lives were written in the Middle Ages, but the authors occupied themselves more with glorifying God than with disclosing human identity. Nevertheless, the essence of saintliness is something very distinct in itself, and Hugh of Lincoln 's life of Adam of Eynsham in the 15th century brings out some of its consistency. In his Edmund Campion, contemporary biographers of saints and martyrs, such as the English writer Evelyn Waugh (born 1903), are more concerned with the kinds of people their subjects were, and are therefore able to provide a more accurate and compelling account of these lives.
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| Jean Fouquet's contemporary miniature shows Louis XI of France on a state occasion. Pierre Champion's modern biography brings such scenes to life again. |
The Italian artist-historian Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) wrote Lives of the Most Excellent Architects, Painters, and Sculptors including 161 lives of Renaissance major and minor artists. His information was gathered from a casual acquaintance, rumor, and conversation of the affected people's friends and enemies. Although material thus collected can not be considered entirely reliable, the Lives (published in 1550) gives us vivid portraits of such artists as Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, and Vasari himself.
Right at the beginning of the 18th century, biography-and memoir, as we generally think about it, came into being at around the same time as the book. As in the book, the cause for this was the increasing concern of human beings for their own sake, as people had ceased to be primarily God-oriented and then became self-oriented.
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| Memorial painting of English diplomat Sir Henry Unton (1557-86), by an unknown artist. Like a written biography, the painting traces Unton's life from infancy (lower right) to death (top center). It also depicts his travels, his home, and his tomb. |
It was in 1781 that the English writer Samuel Johnson (1709-84) completed his Lives of the English Poets, which introduced the lives of Addison, Cowley, Milton, Congreve, and others not merely as an account of truth, but as an illumination of the works of the poets, and as an assistant for their praise. Johnson himself was the subject of one of the most famous biographies ever written by Scot James Boswell (1740-95): The Life of Samuel Johnson. Boswell amassed all kinds of information on his topic. He made notes of real conversations; for several years he used emails, diaries, and anecdotes, and all Johnson's memories.
People portrayed in relation to the events of their time are subjects of biographies by writers such as Philip Guedalla (1889-1944) of England, who wrote about the British Prime Minister Palmerston, and Emil Ludwig (1881-1948) of Switzerland, who wrote the stories of Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln. These biographies present the historical background as an integral part of the story as well as giving us a clear picture of those figures.
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| Portrait of English writer, critic, and conversationalist Samuel Johnson, from the Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides (1786) by his biographer James Boswell. |
Sometimes, biographies were written that, though adhering scrupulously to the facts, were treated more like a fictional novel. The French writers André Maurois (born 1885), on Shelley; Emile Legouis (1861-1937), on Wordsworth; and the English biographer Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), on Queen Victoria, presented the facts with considerable skill, both dramatically and historically reflecting upon them.
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| Marie Antoinette (1755-93), queen of France during the Revolution of 1789-99. Pierre de Nolhac (1859-1936), among other biographers,describes in his Marie Antoinette her life of luxury ai court and her later courage in face of the Revolutionary mobs. |
Naturally, in any biography there must be some element of personal judgment, however objective it is intended to be. In reality, we can not know enough about any human being to qualify for a definitive decision on him. For this reason, a reassessment of a character in a new biography is often required. Not only can we take a different view of things from a time perspective but new evidence is sometimes discovered. By marshaling all available evidence, carefully selecting both small traits and major characteristics, and following events as they occurred, the biographer attempts to build a picture of what his subject has done and what kind of person he was. Even then, as with any great character in literature, the topic of biography is essentially the creation of its author.
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