Autobiography

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For information of autobiographies on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Autobiography. For other uses, see Autobiography (disambiguation).

Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote Confessions, the first Western autobiography ever written, around 400. Portrait by Philippe de Champaigne, 17th century.

An autobiography,[a] sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written account of one's own life, providing a personal narrative that reflects on the author's experiences, memories, and insights. This genre allows individuals to share their unique perspectives and stories, offering readers a glimpse into the author's personal journey and the historical or cultural context in which they lived.

The term "autobiography" was first used in 1797, but the practice of writing about one's life dates back to antiquity. Early examples include

biographies
, which are written by someone else, autobiographies are based on the author's memory and personal interpretation of events, making them inherently subjective. This subjectivity can sometimes lead to inaccuracies or embellishments, as the author may recall events differently or choose to present them in a certain light.

Autobiographies can take various forms, including

memoirs, spiritual autobiographies
, and fictional autobiographies. Memoirs typically focus on specific memories or themes from the author's life, rather than providing a comprehensive account. Spiritual autobiographies, such as Augustine's Confessions, detail the author's religious journey and spiritual growth. Fictional autobiographies, on the other hand, are novels written in the first person, presenting a fictional character's life as if it were an autobiography.

Throughout history, autobiographies have served different purposes, from self-reflection and justification to historical documentation and personal expression. They have evolved with literary trends and societal changes, reflecting the cultural and historical contexts of their times. Autobiographies remain a popular and accessible form of literature in the 21st century, allowing individuals from all walks of life to share their stories and experiences with a wider audience.

Definition

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by

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.[2] 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".[3] 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 their own life.[3]

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 their life as a demonstration of divine intention through encounters with the Divine. The earliest example of a spiritual autobiography is Augustine's

Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography and Black Elk's Black Elk Speaks. Deliverance from Error by Al-Ghazali
is another example. The spiritual autobiography often serves as an endorsement of the writer's religion.

Memoirs

Main article: Memoir

A

Gnaeus Pompeius and the Senate
.

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.

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
.

History

The classical period: Apologia, oration, confession

In antiquity such works were typically entitled apologia, purporting to be self-justification rather than self-documentation. The title of John Henry Newman's 1864 Christian confessional work Apologia Pro Vita Sua refers to this tradition.

The 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.[4]

The

orations
, not of a public kind, but of a literary kind that would not be read aloud in privacy.

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[5]). Confessions is considered one of the great masterpieces of western literature.[6]

Peter Abelard's 12th-century Historia Calamitatum is in the spirit of Augustine's Confessions, an outstanding 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 نامہ; literally: "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."[7] 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).

One of the first autobiographies written in an

Mathura.In his autobiography, he describes his transition from an unruly youth, to a religious realization by the time the work was composed.[9]
The work also is notable for many details of life in Mughal times.

The earliest known autobiography written in English is the Book of Margery Kempe, written in 1438.[10] Following in the earlier tradition of a life story told as an act of Christian witness, the book describes Margery Kempe's pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Rome, her attempts to negotiate a celibate marriage with her husband, and most of all her religious experiences as a Christian mystic. Extracts from the book were published in the early sixteenth century but the whole text was published for the first time only in 1936.[10]

Possibly the first publicly available autobiography written in English was Captain John Smith's autobiography published in 1630[11] 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 basis 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.[12]

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.[13]

18th and 19th centuries

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

Following the trend of

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.[14] 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

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".[15] 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.

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.[17]

A genre where the "claim for truth" overlaps with fictional elements though the work still purports to be autobiographical is autofiction.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Autobiography comes from the Greek, αὐτός autos "self" + βίος bios "life" + γράφειν graphein to write[1]

References

  1. ^ "autobio". Dictionary.com. Retrieved 7 February 2020.
  2. ^ "autobiography", Oxford English Dictionary
  3. ^ a b Pascal, Roy (1960). Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  4. ^ Steve Mason, Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary. Life of Josephus : translation and commentary, Volume 9
  5. ^ Fiorenza and Galvin (1991), p. 317
  6. ISBN 9780199537822
    .
  7. ^ Benvenuto Cellini, tr. George Bull, The Autobiography, London 1966 p. 15.
  8. S2CID 164014497
    .
  9. ISBN 978-1-78374-102-1
    .
  10. ^
    OCLC 13462336.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link
    )
  11. ^ The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captain John Smith into Europe, Aisa, Africa and America from Anno Domini 1593 to 1629
  12. ^ Barbour, Philip L. (1964). The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston.
  13. ISBN 9780813525143
    .
  14. ISBN 978-0801491245
    .
  15. ^ "YouTube star takes online break as she admits novel was 'not written alone'". the Guardian. 2014-12-08. Retrieved 2022-05-03.
  16. ^ about-australia.com.au, 2010
  17. S2CID 149385079
    .

Bibliography
  • Ferrieux, Robert (2001). L'Autobiographie en Grande-Bretagne et en Irlande. Paris: Ellipses. p. 384.
    ISBN 9782729800215
    .
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