Biography, the written account of an individual life, and one of the oldest forms of literary expression. (An autobiography is a biography written by the subject.) The term biography now connotes a conscious literary genre that employs a wide range of sources, strategies, and insights; that deals with the intimate, inconsistent textures of personality and experience; and that attempts to render the whole sense of its subject, not the life only but what it was like to have lived it at its several stages. Ideally, the writer moulds complex biographical facts—birth and death, education, ambition, conflict, milieu, work, relationship, accident—into a book that has the independent vitality of any creative work but is, at the same time, “true to life”.
Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2003. © 1993-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2003. © 1993-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
