Biography: A Brief History

Biography: A Brief History is a book by Nigel Hamilton that portrays, through historiography, the history of biography, and shows how biographers have portrayed and interpreted individuals' lives. The book examines the historical evolution of the biography from the ancient world to the present, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the recent American Splendor, from cuneiform to the Internet, from commemoration to deconstruction, and from fiction to fact. It also examines such famous biographical authors as Plutarch, Saint Augustine, Sir Walter Raleigh, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, Sigmund Freud, Lytton Strachey, Abel Gance, Virginia Woolf, Leni Riefenstahl, Orson Welles, Julian Barnes, Ted Hughes, and Frank McCourt.

Prologue

Nigel Hamilton defines biography as "our creative and non-fiction output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives", and believes that the term biography does not include biographies that can be both commentaries and life stories. He writes that biography is integral to Western ideals of individuality and ideals of democracy, and that although biographies are important, most universities do not have a department devoted to the study of biography, except for the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Evolutionary biography

Nigel Hamilton believes that the most important function of biography is to "contribute to our knowledge, understanding, and reconstruction of past civilizations". The majority of early societies recorded themselves through the "memorialization of distinct individuals", and early societies, such as that of the Ancient Greeks or the Ancient Egyptians used poems, songs, drawings, and written verses to record their history. He believes that knowledge is knowing who one is as well as who others are, and that biography is also used to guide humans' self-understanding as individuals.