BIOGRAPHY.

One of the oldest genres of literature, biography is a written account of a person's life. It is also known as "life writing," a broader term that encompasses autobiography and other narrative forms such as letters, memoirs, journals, and diaries. The term biography derives from the Greek bios (life) and graphein (to write). Latin and Greek terms for biography were used in antiquity. Before the adoption of the word biography into English in the seventeenth century, common terms for biography were life and the Latin biographia.

Many of the earliest "histories" were biographical accounts of the lives of important historical figures. Biography often has been associated with the field of history (and at times has been considered a branch of it), but distinctions between them were drawn beginning in ancient times. Whereas the writers of histories always have purported to present the truth accurately, biographers more obviously have praised their subjects or have presented them as exemplars for moral or didactic (educational) purposes.

Although formal definitions of biography vary, biographical literature includes such forms as character sketches, single biography, serial biography, literary biography, ethical (or didactic) biography, critical biography, and hagiography (sacred biography). In addition, biography shares many features with other literary genres, including travel writing and epistolary literature (that is, literature based on letters), and certain novelistic forms, such as the biographical novel and the bildungsroman that follows the development of a young character. The mixture of fiction with fact in biography means that it has much in common with imaginative literature. For example, the emergence of the novel as a genre paralleled developments in biography. Many early novels adopted a biographical form. In contemporary literature, a novelized biography may be nearly indistinguishable from a biographical novel.

Some commentators have indicated that biography, as an independent form, has been predominantly a product of Western civilization. In particular, they have pointed to the comparatively greater focus on the individual personality in Western biographical literature. If one follows a narrowly construed definition of biography, and adopts Western forms as standards, then this conclusion may seem plausible. Yet while the development of biography in the West has followed a unique trajectory, the production of biographical literature (and likely the biographical impulse witnessed in oral cultures) appears to be universal. Nevertheless, some differences between Western and non-Western traditions must be considered. In China, for example, biographical literature has been largely contained within a historiographic tradition and has been primarily related to the literature of the art of government. In India, biographical writings (such as fragments regarding the Buddha) have been contained within a larger body of spiritual literature.

Just as it is difficult to find an unbiased historical narrative (and many histories have been written for political purposes), biography long has been written for political, moral, or didactic purposes. The origins of biography in epideictic rhetoric (panegyric, or elaborate praise) means that biographers (whether of kings or revolutionaries) have been more interested in praising their subjects' actions or characters than in presenting historically accurate accounts. For this reason, the genre has lent itself to politicized narratives (including political histories or political romances) and narratives that define personal identity. Although biography traditionally has centered on rulers, philosophers, or literati, modern biographers have taken a wide variety of persons for their subjects, including women and individuals from underrepresented or persecuted groups.

Ancient Biography

Biographies have evolved from short narratives that commemorate the deeds of illustrious figures to more complex forms that present the life of an individual in considerable detail. The earliest biographical records include the hieroglyphic inscriptions on Egyptian monuments (c. 1300 b.c.e.) and cuneiform inscriptions found in Assyria (c. 720 b.c.e.) and Persia (c. 520 b.c.e.). These quasi-biographical works commemorated the deeds of kings. Similarly, the oldest biographical writings in England were runic inscriptions that related the lives of heroes. Apart from Western quasi-biographical works, the earliest biographies appeared in the second century b.c.e. in China. The Shih-chih (Historical records) by Sima Qian (formerly transliterated as Ssu-ma Ch'ien, c. 145–c. 85 b.c.e.) included short character sketches, anecdotes, and dialogue between archetypal subjects. The historian Ban Gu (formerly transliterated as Pan Ku, 31–92 c.e.) continued this tradition in the Han shu (History of the former Han dynasty).

While biographical literature existed in the West as early as the fifth century b.c.e., a more defined notion of biography did not appear there until the Hellenistic age. Ion of Chios (c. 490–c. 421 b.c.e.) wrote quasi-biographical character sketches of eminent figures such as Pericles and Sophocles. Xenophon (c. 431–c. 352 b.c.e.) wrote a life of Cyrus (c. 365 b.c.e.) that praised the king. He also commemorated Socrates in the Memorabilia. Other quasi-biographical works include Plato's dialogues on Socrates, the Apology and the Phaedo.

Among the earliest surviving biographies are those contained in De viris illustribus (On illustrious men), by Cornelius Nepos (c. 100–c. 25 b.c.e.). This work became a model for subsequent serial biography, a form that consisted of the collected lives of one or more categories of illustrious persons. Plutarch (c. 46–after 119 c.e.) is perhaps the most famous ancient biographer. His Parallel Lives comprised forty-six biographies assembled in pairs. This work was an early example of a collection of single, autonomous lives. Plutarch showed a greater interest in revealing a subject's moral character than in documenting historical details, a feature that is typical of panegyric literature. He also praised his subjects in many anecdotes and digressions.

Other early biographers included Cornelius Tacitus (c. 56–c. 120 c.e.) and Suetonius (c. 69–after 122 c.e.). Suetonius presented the life of Julius Caesar and the lives of the first eleven emperors in his De vita Caesarum (c. 110 c.e.; English trans. The Twelve Caesars, 2003). Following Plutarch, he emphasized the personal lives of the emperors rather than historical details in his collection of single lives. Suetonius also wrote De viris illustribus (c. 106–113; On illustrious men), a series of biographies of illustrious figures (philosophers, orators, and literati) that became a model for serial biography.

Diogenes Laertius (3rd century b.c.e.) wrote the Lives of Eminent Philosophers, a series of biographies of Greek philosophers. This work is the most complete surviving example of the ancient genre of philosophers' lives (the revival of which in the fifteenth century had a major impact on early modern biography). Diogenes notably indicates in his accounts that the actions and behaviors of the philosophers serve to exemplify their teachings. Although he focused on the private lives of his subjects, he also was known for his meticulous documentation of sources. His serial Lives were instructive to later biographers because he arranged them by the relations of masters to disciples and by individuals' contributions in their fields. St. Jerome (c. 347–419 or 420) wrote the exemplary serial biography in late antiquity. His De viris illustribus (c. 392; En lish trans. On Illustrious Men, 1999) was an elaboration on Suetonius's notes on the lives of the philosophers. It was widely imitated for three centuries and revived as a model in the twelfth century. He also incorporated elements of classical biography in his lives of saints, which greatly influenced medieval biographers.

Medieval and Renaissance Biography

The works of Plutarch, Suetonius, and St. Jerome remained models for biographers in the medieval and Renaissance periods. The characteristic biographical form of the medieval period was the life of the saint (the sacred life or hagiography). Although many collections of saints' lives or acts (martyrologies) were compiled, there was often little differentiation between the characteristics of individual saints. While medieval hagiographers heavily drew on classic biographies, they focused on praising the spiritual virtues of their subjects and offered evidence for their canonization. Hagiography consequently developed unique conventions, such as the preservation of miracles and the martyrdom of saints. Exemplary lives of this period include Adamnan's Life of St. Columba (c. 690), Bede's Life of St. Cuthbert (c. 731), Eadmer's Life of St. Anselm (c. 1124), and Jean de Joinville's History of St. Louis (c. 1309). Other important biographical works include the Lives of the Fathers and the History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours (538–594), Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c. 731), and later Einhard's Life of Charlemagne (c. 829–836; based on Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars ).

Humanist biographers in the Renaissance were influenced by classical lives and the lives of saints. Petrarch's incomplete De viris illustribus (begun c. 1337; On illustrious men) is in the tradition of single biographies of eminent ancient figures (following Suetonius and Plutarch). Giovanni Boccaccio's Trattatello in laude di Dante (1354–1355; English trans. Life of Dante, 1990) exemplifies the revival of the single life of a subject presented as an ideal. Influenced by Petrarch, Boccaccio assembled two collections of single lives concerning illustrious ancient figures, De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–1374; On the fall of illustrious men) and De claris mulieribus (1360–1374; On famous women), the first collection of women's lives. Partly in response to Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus, Christine de Pisan (1364–c. 1430) wrote her vernacular Le livre de la cité des dames (1405; English trans. The Book of the City of Ladies, 1998), often considered the first work of feminist literature. Notably, the earliest modern English autobiography is The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1432–1436), by Margery Kempe (c. 1373–c. 1440), a work that largely follows the conventions of medieval sacred biography.

Renaissance biographers borrowed extensively from the works of Diogenes Laertius and St. Jerome, especially in developing new serial lives assembled according to notions of cultural progress. In De origine civitatis Florentiae et de eiusdem famosis civibus (c. 1381–1382; On the origins of the Florentine state and her most famous citizens), Filippo Villani presented short sketches of a wide variety of Florentine citizens, including poets, musicians, and painters. Later, Giorgio Vasari wrote his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550, rev. ed. 1568), following progressive developments in art through a series of biographies that culminated in Michelangelo. In England, William Roper (1496–1578) wrote the Life of Sir Thomas More and George Cavendish (1500–1561?) wrote the Life of Cardinal Wolsey. Other biographical writings were the Lives of Famous Ladies and the Lives of Famous Men by Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme (c. 1540–1614) and Macarius's Stepennaya Kniga (1563; Book of degrees) in Russia.

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The English term biography was first used by John Dryden in 1683. The seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century witnessed expanded production of many types of life writing, including diaries, letters, and memoirs. Biographies by women appeared in this period, such as Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson by Lucy Hutchinson (1620–after 1675) and The Life of William Cavendish (1667) by Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673). Some important biographical works were the five lives of eminent figures by Izaak Walton (1593–1683), the Lives of Eminent Men by John Aubrey (1626–1697), the diary of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), and Roger North's Lives of the Norths (1742–1744). The most influential English biography was James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Boswell adopted the methods of earlier biographers, but artfully combined letters, personal documents, conversation, anecdotes, and his own observations to present a vivid portrait of Johnson. His in-depth treatment had a major impact on biography throughout the world.

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Early-nineteenth-century biography was influenced by Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson as well as by the writers within the Romantic movement. The primary biographical form in this period was the Victorian "life and letters" (or "life and times"). It was characterized by relatively great length, sobriety, and concern with social propriety. Some biographies of this period were Thomas Moore's Life of Sheridan (1825) and his Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830), John Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837–1838), Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), G. O. Trevelyan's Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (1876), and David Mason's Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time (7 vols., London, 1859–1894). Popular literary genres of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were influenced by biography included the realistic novel and the historical novel.

Biography in the twentieth century reflected the rise of modernism in the arts. There was a reaction against the Victorian style of biography that resulted in shorter, less studious lives. Works of modernist biography include Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921) and the numerous lives by André Maurois (1885–1967). Changes in style also were reflected in biographers' adoption of a scientific outlook. The influence of psychology (especially Freudian and Jungian) eventually led to the development of psychobiography. Experimental forms and methods were explored in works as diverse as Virginia Woolf's mock biography Orlando (1928), Lord David Cecil's two-volume work on Lord Melbourne (1939 and 1954), and A. J. A. Symon's The Quest for Corvo (1934). Postmodern forms of life writing emerged after World War II. Although more represented in autobiography than biography, postmodern lives have been characterized by further experimentation and the broad use of nontraditional methods. Postmodern biography in many ways reacts against modernist biography but is also an extension of it. It contains elements that are antiheroic, antihistorical, and absurd, or that consciously undermine conventional forms.

There were other major developments in the late twentieth century. One was the widespread appearance of biographies by and about women, and in particular, the establishment of feminist life writing as a literary form. Feminist biography had appeared in the fifteenth century, and feminists' writings had flourished at times, especially in the late eighteenth century (for example, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792). The late twentieth century, however, saw the rise of feminism as a major cultural movement and a rapid increase in feminist life writings. Late-twentieth-century feminist biographies were numerous and included several lives of Woolf. Feminist biographers have drawn inspiration from the works of earlier feminists, including the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) and Woolf's essays A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). In addition to the establishment of feminist biography and the increase in biographies written by women (with women as subjects), lesbian and gay biography also became independent forms in the late twentieth century (such as Elizabeth Mavor's The Ladies of Llangollen, 1971).

The late twentieth century witnessed the emergence of traditionally underrepresented groups in biography, both as subjects and as biographers. In the United States, for example, subjects were increasingly African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic, and Native American (or were members of other underrepresented or immigrant groups). Some of these biographies built on earlier traditions (for example, African-American lives range from pre–Civil War slave narratives to Alex Haley's Roots, 1976). Biographers working in various postcolonial literatures also produced many lives of subjects from underrepresented groups.

Another major development has been the globalization of biography. As biographical forms have become diffused around the world, they have encompassed subjects from cultures in Africa, the Americas, East and Southeast Asia, Australia, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and other regions. It is notable that while biographical forms have spread worldwide, biographers have continued to draw on forms established in earlier times (both oral and written). In the early twenty-first century, as a result of these trends, biography is an increasingly global art, evidenced by the diversity in its subjects and forms.

See also Autobiography ; Genre ; Literature .

bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES

Ban Gu (Pan Ku). The History of the Former Han Dynasty. 3 vols. Translated by Homer H. Dubs. Baltimore, Md.: Waverly Press; and Ithaca, N.Y.: Spoken Language Services, Inc., 1938–1955. Translation of the Han shu.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. Life of Dante. 1354–1355. Translated by Vincenzo Zin Bollettino. New York: Garland, 1990. Translation of Trattatello in laude di Dante.

Boswell, James. The Life of Johnson. 1791. Reprint, edited by George Birbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. 4 vols.

Christine de Pisan. The Book of the City of Ladies. 1405. Translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards. New York: Persea, 1998. Translation of Le livre de la cité des dames.

Jerome, St. On Illustrious Men. c. 392. Translated by Thomas P. Halton. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1999. Translation of De viris illustribus.

Nanamoll, Bhikku. The Life of the Buddha. Seattle: Buddhist Publication Society, 2001. Translated from the Pali Canon.

Plutarch. Lives. Edited by Arthur Hugh Clough and translated by John Dryden. New York: Modern Library, 2001. 2 vols. Clough's 1864 revision of Dryden's 1683 translation.

Sima Quan (Ssu-ma Ch'ien). The Records of the Grand Historian of China. 2 vols. Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Translations from the Shih-chih.

Strachey, Lytton. The Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon. 1918. Reprint, London: Continuum, 2002.

Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars. c. 110 c.e. Translated by Robert Graves. London: Penguin, 2003.

Sylvester, Richard S., and Davis P. Harding, eds. Two Early Tudor Lives: "The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey," by George Cavendish [and] "The Life of Sir Thomas More," by William Roper. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962.

Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Rev. ed. 1568. Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere. New York: Knopf, 1996.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Edel, Leon. Literary Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957.

Frederick Liers

biography, Biography has achieved a Golden Age in the last forty years, and found a favoured if controversial place in literary and intellectual life. It has risen as virtually a new genre, challenging the novel in its ability to depict character and explore ideas through narrative. But it has also courted sensationalism and scandal.

The Greeks and Romans bequeathed a public tradition of life-writing to English authors through the works of Xenophon, Suetonius, and Pliny the elder, and notably through T. North's translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579), with its emphasis on political and military prowess. There was also a native tradition of early hagiography, as in Ælfric's Lives of the Saints (993–8). In the 17th cent. I. Walton wrote pious lives of the poets Donne (1640) and Herbert (1670). The eccentric antiquary J. Aubrey gathered a collection of donnish scurrilities in his Brief Lives (MS 1693; published 1813).

But the true English form really became popular in the 18th cent., with numerous biographical collections such as the lives of criminals in the Newgate Calendar (5 vols, 1773) and The Lives of the English Poets (1779–81) by S. Johnson, who, in The Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), combined both in a blackly comic account of a Grub Street poet and convicted murderer.

The rich human appeal that Johnson saw in the new form was set out in his seminal essay, ‘On the Genius of Biography’, in Rambler No. 60 (1750), and later explored by the philosopher W. Godwin in the moving biographical Memoir (1794) of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. But it was J. Boswell, in his celebrated Life of Samuel Johnson Lld (1791), who created the first distinctive masterpiece of English biography, using vividly dramatized scenes (worked up from his Journals) within a meticulous chronological narrative.

The imaginative tension between the two selves—the private and the public Johnson—became a hallmark of what the English form could achieve. It also clearly reflects the ethos of the European Enlightenment (Boswell knew Hume, Voltaire, and Rousseau): fearless and rational enquiry into the human condition, and greater toleration of other natures and beliefs.

The great flowering of Victorian biography that followed is still being reassessed. Though many biographers like Boswell were close friends of their subjects—Lockhart writing of his father-in-law W. Scott (1837–8), J. Forster of his confidant Dickens (1872–4), Carlyle of his lost companion Sterling (1851), and Froude of his master, Carlyle (1881)—the public was again demanding monuments to virtue. This affected even such a sympathetic study as Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), with its deliberate suppression of romantic episodes. An apotheosis was reached in Leslie Stephen's editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–90), a 26-volume collection of more than 10,000 public life-notices.

Lytton Strachey, in his four elegant studies (with a satiric Preface) in Eminent Victorians (1918)—of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr T. Arnold of Rugby, and General Gordon—refreshingly liberated the artistic form of English biography once more. At the same time (as a contemporary of Freud) Strachey played gleeful havoc with easy accusations of hypocrisy, debunking any notion of spiritual heroism. Nonetheless, his work encouraged valuable experiments in the structure of biographical narrative, and a much more sophisticated approach to the contradictions of human character. These experiments have become an influential part of the modern English tradition, already pioneered by E. Gosse, whose standard Victorian life of his father, P. H. Gosse (1890), was followed by a devastating reappraisal in Father and Son (1907), written through his own eyes as a child.

Other influential experiments include V. Woolf's Orlando (1928, a disguised life of V. Sackville-West through four centuries and a sex change), and Flush (1933), a life of the Brownings seen through the eyes of their pet dog. A. J. A. Symons explored biography as a labyrinthine detective story, in The Quest for Corvo (1934). An actual legal case, an embargo on biographical research brought by a living subject, turned I. Hamilton's In Search of J. D. Salinger (1988) into a mordant study of the ethics and psychology of life-writing itself. J. Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984) was a brilliant postmodern parody of the art of biographical misinterpretation.

These experiments have encouraged ever more detailed research, with more stylish narrative techniques. This is especially true in literary biography, which has returned to the large, comprehensive form of ‘Life and Work’ considered as a single dramatic and psychological unity. Outstanding among these are R. Ellmann's scholarly Irish trilogy, lives of Yeats (1948), Joyce (1959), and Wilde (1987); and M. Holroyd's socially expansive portraits of Lytton Strachey (1967–8, a tragi-comic masterpiece of Bloomsbury life), Augustus John (1974–5), and G. B. Shaw (1988–92). New ground has also been broken with Ray Monk's limpid philosophical lives of Wittgenstein (1990) and B. Russell (1995), P. Ackroyd's Dickens (1990, with fictional interludes), and Hermione Lee's fine thematic approach to the life of Virginia Woolf (1996). An older tradition of colonizing European subjects, initiated by G. H. Lewes's Goethe (1855), has re-emerged with George Painter's Proust (1959), David Sweetman's Picasso (1973), and Graham Robb's vigorous portraits of Balzac (1994) and Hugo (1997).

One remarkable development is a renewed interest in lives of women in response to feminism. Notable work here has been done by Hilary Spurling on the life of Ivy Compton-Burnett (1974, 1984), V. Glendinning on the adventures of Vita Sackville-West (1983), and C. Tomalin on Mary Wollstonecraft (1974) and D. Jordan (1994). Tomalin's The Invisible Woman (1990) transforms the life of Dickens by investigating it through the eyes of his secret mistress, Nellie Ternan. There is also increasing interest in the lives of scientists such as H. Davy and I. Newton; and a number of the formative intellectual figures of modern culture, including C. Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Sartre.

There is now a considerable body of theoretical work on biography as an artistic form: Woolf's lively essays on the ‘New Biography’ (1925), the French biographer André Maurois's shrewd appraisal Aspects of Biography (1928), and more recently R. Gittings' The Nature of Biography (1978), Richard Ellmann's Golden Codgers (1976), and Leon Edel's Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1984). These explore such issues as the ethics of ‘invading’ privacy; the ambiguity of the links between art and life; the questionable objectivity of such sources as letters and diaries; the distortions involved in ‘plotting’ a life as a continuous narrative; the role of empathy and psychological ‘transference’ between author and subject; and the vexed question of the ‘celebrity’ life which has produced some 500 lives of Napoleon, 200 lives of Byron, forty lives of Marilyn Monroe, and already five lives of S. Plath.

If the form has seen a Golden Age, its future is by no means certain. It may be petrified by the growing weight of academic research; it may be liquefied by the populist demands of television documentaries, historical feature films, or simply sensationalist journalism (the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, is a cautionary tale). It is difficult to tell what effect the vast increase in electronically available historical databases will eventually have. It is possible that the professional biographer, intent on creating a work of historical art in ‘trying to bring the dead back to life again’ ( R. Holmes, Footsteps, 1984), will soon become a quaint, antiquarian figure. Or it is possible that the English form, which combines so wonderfully the imaginative and the critical spirit, has triumphs yet to come.

Biography (1932), a comedy by S. N. Behrman. [Guild Theatre, 267 perf.] Marion Froude ( Ina Claire) is a celebrated artist who has had many lovers all over the world but no husbands. One of her earliest loves, Leander Nolan ( Jay Fassett), now a successful lawyer and running for Senator, comes to have his portrait painted. At the same time, Richard Kurt ( Earle Larimore), a radical young editor, appears with an offer to publish Marion's autobiography. Although at first she finds Kurt “bumptious and insufferable,” she quickly develops a fondness for him and he falls in love with her. When Nolan learns that Marion has agreed to write her life history, he is furious, for he knows it will ruin his chances of election. But the behavior of his prospective father‐in‐law and his fiancée makes him wonder if he really doesn't still love Marion. Marion recognizes that she would be happy neither with Nolan, who has grown too conservative, nor with Kurt, who is hopelessly hate‐filled. She destroys her manuscript and, receiving an offer to paint some Hollywood celebrities, she tells her maid to pack. She will resume her wayfaring, wayward existence. Most critics agreed with Robert Garland of the World‐Telegram who noted, “The Theatre Guild has gotten around to a play worthy of the high position it occupies in the history of the modern American theatre . . . adult and provocative . . . an evening of rare playgoing felicity.” It remains Behrman's finest work.

André Maurois , 1885–1967, French biographer, novelist, and essayist. His name was originally Émile Herzog. His first work, The Silence of Colonel Bramble (1918, tr. 1920), describing British military life, was highly successful. Ariel (1923, tr. 1924), a life of Shelley, was followed by lives of Byron, Disraeli, Chateaubriand, Washington, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and others. Other works include A History of England (1937, tr. rev. ed. 1958), Tragedy in France (1940, tr. 1940), From My Journal (1946, tr. 1948), and Proust (1949, tr. 1950). Maurois wrote discerningly on the art of biography as well as on writing and on living.

Bibliography: See his memoirs (2 vol., tr. 1942 and 1970).

bi·og·ra·phy / bīˈägrəfē/ • n. (pl. -phies) an account of someone's life written by someone else. ∎  writing of such a type as a branch of literature. ∎  a human life in its course: although their individual biographies are different, both are motivated by a similar ambition. DERIVATIVES: bi·og·ra·pher / -fər/ n. bi·o·graph·ic / ˌbīəˈgrafik/ adj. bi·o·graph·i·cal / ˌbīəˈgrafikəl/ adj.

penguin the penguin, noted for its wings developed into flippers for swimming under water, may be referred to in relation to a clumsy, waddling walk; the black and white plumage has also given rise to the informal penguin suit to denote a man's evening dress of black dinner jacket worn with a white shirt.
Penguin Books the name of the paperback publishing imprint founded by Allen Lane in 1935; the first ten titles, published in 1936 and priced at sixpence each, included titles by Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, and André Maurois.

biography See LIFE-HISTORY; PERSONAL DOCUMENTS.

biography •daffy, taffy •Amalfi •Cavafy, Gaddafi •Effie •beefy, Fifi, leafy •cliffy, iffy, jiffy, Liffey, niffy, sniffy, spiffy, squiffy, stiffy, whiffy •salsify •coffee, toffee •wharfie •Sophie, strophe, trophy •Dufy, goofy, Sufi •fluffy, huffy, puffy, roughie, roughy, scruffy, snuffy, stuffy, toughie •comfy • atrophy •anastrophe, catastrophe •calligraphy, epigraphy, tachygraphy •dystrophy, epistrophe •autobiography, bibliography, biography, cardiography, cartography, chirography, choreography, chromatography, cinematography, cosmography, cryptography, demography, discography, filmography, geography, hagiography, historiography, hydrography, iconography, lexicography, lithography, oceanography, orthography, palaeography (US paleography), photography, pornography, radiography, reprography, stenography, topography, typography •apostrophe •gymnosophy, philosophy, theosophy •furphy, murphy, scurfy, surfy, turfy