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autobiography

Definition of autobiography

Examples of autobiography in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'autobiography.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

auto- + biography , perhaps after German Autobiographie

1797, in the meaning defined above

Phrases Containing autobiography

semi - autobiography

Dictionary Entries Near autobiography

autobiographist

Cite this Entry

“Autobiography.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/autobiography. Accessed 5 Apr. 2024.

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Autobiography

Definition of autobiography.

Autobiography is one type of biography , which tells the life story of its author, meaning it is a written record of the author’s life. Rather than being written by somebody else, an autobiography comes through the person’s own pen, in his own words. Some autobiographies are written in the form of a fictional tale; as novels or stories that closely mirror events from the author’s real life. Such stories include Charles Dickens ’ David Copperfield and J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye . In writing about personal experience, one discovers himself. Therefore, it is not merely a collection of anecdotes – it is a revelation to the readers about the author’s self-discovery.

Difference between Autobiography and Memoir

In an autobiography, the author attempts to capture important elements of his life. He not only deals with his career, and growth as a person, he also uses emotions and facts related to family life, relationships, education, travels, sexuality, and any types of inner struggles. A memoir is a record of memories and particular events that have taken place in the author’s life. In fact, it is the telling of a story or an event from his life; an account that does not tell the full record of a life.

Six Types of Autobiography

There are six types of autobiographies:

Autobiography: A personal account that a person writes himself/herself.
Memoir : An account of one’s memory.
Reflective Essay : One’s thoughts about something.
Confession: An account of one’s wrong or right doings.
Monologue : An address of one’s thoughts to some audience or interlocuters.
Biography : An account of the life of other persons written by someone else.

Importance of Autobiography

Autobiography is a significant genre in literature. Its significance or importance lies in authenticity, veracity, and personal testimonies. The reason is that people write about challenges they encounter in their life and the ways to tackle them. This shows the veracity and authenticity that is required of a piece of writing to make it eloquent, persuasive, and convincing.

Examples of Autobiography in Literature

Example #1: the box: tales from the darkroom by gunter grass.

A noble laureate and novelist, Gunter Grass , has shown a new perspective of self-examination by mixing up his quilt of fictionalized approach in his autobiographical book, “The Box: Tales from the Darkroom.” Adopting the individual point of view of each of his children, Grass narrates what his children think about him as their father and a writer. Though it is really an experimental approach, due to Grass’ linguistic creativity and dexterity, it gains an enthralling momentum.

Example #2: The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

In her autobiography, The Story of My Life , Helen Keller recounts her first twenty years, beginning with the events of the childhood illness that left her deaf and blind. In her childhood, a writer sent her a letter and prophesied, “Someday you will write a great story out of your own head that will be a comfort and help to many.”

In this book, Keller mentions prominent historical personalities, such as Alexander Graham Bell, whom she met at the age of six, and with whom she remained friends for several years. Keller paid a visit to John Greenleaf Whittier , a famous American poet, and shared correspondence with other eminent figures, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Mrs. Grover Cleveland. Generally, Keller’s autobiography is about overcoming great obstacles through hard work and pain.

Example #3: Self Portraits: Fictions by Frederic Tuten

In his autobiography, “Self Portraits: Fictions ,” Frederic Tuten has combined the fringes of romantic life with reality. Like postmodern writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, the stories of Tuten skip between truth and imagination, time and place, without warning. He has done the same with his autobiography, where readers are eager to move through fanciful stories about train rides, circus bears, and secrets to a happy marriage; all of which give readers glimpses of the real man.

Example #4: My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard

Reliving the success of his literary career through the lens of the many prizes he has received, Thomas Bernhard presents a sarcastic commentary in his autobiography, “My Prizes.” Bernhard, in fact, has taken a few things too seriously. Rather, he has viewed his life as a farcical theatrical drama unfolding around him. Although Bernhard is happy with the lifestyle and prestige of being an author, his blasé attitude and scathing wit make this recollection more charmingly dissident and hilarious.

Example #5: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

“The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin ” is written by one of the founding fathers of the United States. This book reveals Franklin’s youth, his ideas, and his days of adversity and prosperity. He is one of the best examples of living the American dream – sharing the idea that one can gain financial independence, and reach a prosperous life through hard work.

Through autobiography, authors can speak directly to their readers, and to their descendants. The function of the autobiography is to leave a legacy for its readers. By writing an autobiography, the individual shares his triumphs and defeats, and lessons learned, allowing readers to relate and feel motivated by inspirational stories. Life stories bridge the gap between peoples of differing ages and backgrounds, forging connections between old and new generations.

Synonyms of Autobiography

The following words are close synonyms of autobiography such as life story, personal account, personal history, diary, journal, biography, or memoir.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

How to Define Autobiography

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

An Introduction to Punctuation
Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
B.A., English, State University of New York

An autobiography is an account of a person's life written or otherwise recorded by that person. Adjective: autobiographical .

Many scholars regard the Confessions (c. 398) by Augustine of Hippo (354–430) as the first autobiography.

The term fictional autobiography (or pseudoautobiography ) refers to novels that employ first-person narrators who recount the events of their lives as if they actually happened. Well-known examples include David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

Some critics believe that all autobiographies are in some ways fictional. Patricia Meyer Spacks has observed that "people do make themselves up. . . . To read an autobiography is to encounter a self as an imaginative being" ( The Female Imagination , 1975).

For the distinction between a memoir and an autobiographical composition, see memoir as well as the examples and observations below.

From the Greek, "self" + "life" + "write"

Examples of Autobiographical Prose

Imitating the Style of the Spectator , by Benjamin Franklin
Langston Hughes on Harlem
On the Street, by Emma Goldman
Ritual in Maya Angelou's Caged Bird
The Turbid Ebb and Flow of Misery, by Margaret Sanger
Two Ways of Seeing a River, by Mark Twain

Examples and Observations of Autobiographical Compositions

"An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing." (Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant , 1968)
"Putting a life into words rescues it from confusion even when the words declare the omnipresence of confusion, since the art of declaring implies dominance." (Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England . Harvard University Press, 1976)
The Opening Lines of Zora Neale Hurston's Autobiography - "Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say. "So you will have to know something about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life. "I was born in a Negro town. I do not mean by that the black back-side of an average town. Eatonville, Florida, is, and was at the time of my birth, a pure Negro town--charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all. It was not the first Negro community in America, but it was the first to be incorporated, the first attempt at organized self-government on the part of Negroes in America. "Eatonville is what you might call hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick. The town was not in the original plan. It is a by-product of something else. . . ." (Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road . J.B. Lippincott, 1942) - "There is a saying in the Black community that advises: 'If a person asks you where you're going, you tell him where you've been. That way you neither lie nor reveal your secrets.' Hurston had called herself the 'Queen of the Niggerati.' She also said, 'I like myself when I'm laughing.' Dust Tracks on a Road is written with royal humor and an imperious creativity. But then all creativity is imperious, and Zora Neale Hurston was certainly creative." (Maya Angelou, Foreword to Dust Tracks on a Road , rpt. HarperCollins, 1996)
Autobiography and Truth "All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies; I mean deliberate lies. No man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime, involving, as it must, the truth about his family and friends and colleagues. And no man is good enough to tell the truth in a document which he suppresses until there is nobody left alive to contradict him." (George Bernard Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches , 1898)" " Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people." (attributed to Thomas Carlyle, Philip Guedalla, and others)
Autobiography and Memoir - "An autobiography is the story of a life : the name implies that the writer will somehow attempt to capture all the essential elements of that life. A writer's autobiography, for example, is not expected to deal merely with the author's growth and career as a writer but also with the facts and emotions connected to family life, education, relationships, sexuality, travels, and inner struggles of all kinds. An autobiography is sometimes limited by dates (as in Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949 by Doris Lessing), but not obviously by theme. "Memoir, on the other hand, is a story from a life . It makes no pretense of replicating a whole life." (Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art . Eighth Mountain Press, 2002) - "Unlike autobiography , which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer's life that was unusually vivid, such as childhood or adolescence, or that was framed by war or travel or public service or some other special circumstance." (William Zinsser, "Introduction," Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir . Mariner Books, 1998)
An "Epidemical Rage for Auto-Biography" "[I]f the populace of writers become thus querulous after fame (to which they have no pretensions) we shall expect to see an epidemical rage for auto-biography break out, more wide in its influence and more pernicious in its tendency than the strange madness of the Abderites, so accurately described by Lucian. London, like Abdera, will be peopled solely by 'men of genius'; and as the frosty season, the grand specific for such evils, is over, we tremble for the consequences. Symptoms of this dreadful malady (though somewhat less violent) have appeared amongst us before . . .." (Isaac D'Israeli, "Review of "The Memoirs of Percival Stockdale," 1809)|
The Lighter Side of Autobiography - "The Confessions of St. Augustine are the first autobiography , and they have this to distinguish them from all other autobiographies, that they are addressed directly to God." (Arthur Symons, Figures of Several Centuries , 1916) - "I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography , I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or isn't." (Philip Roth, Deception , 1990) - "I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography ." (Steven Wright)

Pronunciation: o-toe-bi-OG-ra-fee

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Literary Terms
Autobiography
Definition & Examples
When & How to Write Autobiography

I. What is Autobiography?

An autobiography is a self-written life story.

It is different from a biography , which is the life story of a person written by someone else. Some people may have their life story written by another person because they don’t believe they can write well, but they are still considered an author because they are providing the information. Reading autobiographies may be more interesting than biographies because you are reading the thoughts of the person instead of someone else’s interpretation.

II. Examples of Autobiography

One of the United States’ forefathers wrote prolifically (that means a lot!) about news, life, and common sense. His readings, quotes, and advice are still used today, and his face is on the $100 bill. Benjamin Franklin’s good advice is still used through his sayings, such as “We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” He’s also the one who penned the saying that’s seen all over many schools: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” His autobiography is full of his adventures , philosophy about life, and his wisdom. His autobiography shows us how much he valued education through his anecdotes (stories) of his constant attempts to learn and improve himself. He also covers his many ideas on his inventions and his thoughts as he worked with others in helping the United States become free from England.

III. Types of Autobiography

There are many types of autobiographies. Authors must decide what purpose they have for writing about their lives, and then they can choose the format that would best tell their story. Most of these types all share common goals: helping themselves face an issue by writing it down, helping others overcome similar events, or simply telling their story.

a. Full autobiography (traditional):

This would be the complete life story, starting from birth through childhood, young adulthood, and up to the present time at which the book is being written. Authors might choose this if their whole lives were very different from others and could be considered interesting.

There are many types of memoirs – place, time, philosophic (their theory on life), occupational, etc. A memoir is a snapshot of a person’s life. It focuses on one specific part that stands out as a learning experience or worth sharing.

c. Psychological illness

People who have suffered mental illness of any kind find it therapeutic to write down their thoughts. Therapists are specialists who listen to people’s problems and help them feel better, but many people find writing down their story is also helpful.

d. Confession

Just as people share a psychological illness, people who have done something very wrong may find it helps to write down and share their story. Sharing the story may make one feel he or she is making amends (making things right), or perhaps hopes that others will learn and avoid the same mistake.

e. Spiritual

Spiritual and religious experiences are very personal . However, many people feel that it’s their duty and honor to share these stories. They may hope to pull others into their beliefs or simply improve others’ lives.

f. Overcoming adversity

Unfortunately, many people do not have happy, shining lives. Terrible events such as robberies, assaults, kidnappings, murders, horrific accidents, and life-threatening illnesses are common in some lives. Sharing the story can inspire others while also helping the person express deep emotions to heal.

IV. The Importance of Autobiography

Autobiographies are an important part of history. Being able to read the person’s own ideas and life stories is getting the first-person story versus the third-person (he-said/she-said) version. In journalism, reporters go to the source to get an accurate account of an event. The same is true when it comes to life stories. Reading the story from a second or third source will not be as reliable. The writer may be incorrectly explaining and describing the person’s life events.

Autobiographies are also important because they allow other people in similar circumstances realize that they are not alone. They can be inspiring for those who are facing problems in their lives. For the author, writing the autobiography allows them to heal as they express their feelings and opinions. Autobiographies are also an important part of history.

V. Examples of Autobiography in Literature

A popular autobiography that has lasted almost 100 years is that of Helen Keller. Her life story has been made into numerous movies and plays. Her teacher, Anne Sullivan, has also had her life story written and televised multiple times. Students today still read and learn about this young girl who went blind and deaf at 19 months of age, causing her to also lose her ability to learn to speak. Sullivan’s entrance into Helen’s life when the girl was seven was the turning point. She learned braille and soon became an activist for helping blind and deaf people across the nation. She died in 1968, but her autobiography is still helping others.

Even in the days before my teacher came, I used to feel along the square stiff boxwood hedges, and, guided by the sense of smell, would find the first violets and lilies. There, too, after a fit of temper, I went to find comfort and to hide my hot face in the cool leaves and grass. What joy it was to lose myself in that garden of flowers, to wander happily from spot to spot, until, coming suddenly upon a beautiful vine, I recognized it by its leaves and blossoms, and knew it was the vine which covered the tumble-down summer-house at the farther end of the garden! (Keller).

An autobiography that many middle and high school students read every year is “Night” by Elie Wiesel. His story is also a memoir, covering his teen years as he and his family went from the comfort of their own home to being forced into a Jewish ghetto with other families, before ending up in a Nazi prison camp. His book is not that long, but the details and description he uses brings to life the horrors of Hitler’s reign of terror in Germany during World War II. Students also read “The Diary of Anne Frank,” another type of autobiography that shows a young Jewish girl’s daily life while hiding from the Nazis to her eventual capture and death in a German camp. Both books are meant to remind us to not be indifferent to the world’s suffering and to not allow hate to take over.

“The people were saying, “The Red Army is advancing with giant strides…Hitler will not be able to harm us, even if he wants to…” Yes, we even doubted his resolve to exterminate us. Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means? In the middle of the twentieth century! And thus my elders concerned themselves with all manner of things—strategy, diplomacy, politics, and Zionism—but not with their own fate. Even Moishe the Beadle had fallen silent. He was weary of talking. He would drift through synagogue or through the streets, hunched over, eyes cast down, avoiding people’s gaze. In those days it was still possible to buy emigration certificates to Palestine. I had asked my father to sell everything, to liquidate everything, and to leave” (Wiesel 8).

VI. Examples of Autobiography in Pop Culture

One example of an autobiography that was a hit in the movie theaters is “American Sniper,” the story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. According to an article in the Dallas, Texas, magazine D, Kyle donated all the proceeds from the film to veterans and their families. He had a story to tell, and he used it to help others. His story is a memoir, focusing on a specific time period of his life when he was overseas in the military.

An autobiography by a young Olympian is “Grace, Gold and Glory: My Leap of Faith” by Gabrielle (Gabby) Douglas. She had a writer, Michelle Burford, help her in writing her autobiography. This is common for those who have a story to tell but may not have the words to express it well. Gabby was the darling of the 2012 Olympics, winning gold medals for the U.S. in gymnastics along with being the All-Around Gold Medal winner, the first African-American to do so. Many young athletes see her as an inspiration. Her story also became a television movie, “The Gabby Douglas Story.”

VII. Related Terms

The life story of one person written by another. The purpose may to be highlight an event or person in a way to help the public learn a lesson, feel inspired, or to realize that they are not alone in their circumstance. Biographies are also a way to share history. Historic and famous people may have their biographies written by many authors who research their lives years after they have died.

VIII. Conclusion

Autobiographies are a way for people to share stories that may educate, inform, persuade, or inspire others. Many people find writing their stories to be therapeutic, healing them beyond what any counseling might do or as a part of the counseling. Autobiographies are also a way to keep history alive by allowing people in the present learn about those who lived in the past. In the future, people can learn a lot about our present culture by reading autobiographies by people of today.

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Definition of autobiography noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

autobiography

In his autobiography, he recalls the poverty he grew up in.
in an/the autobiography

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The Oxford Learner’s Thesaurus explains the difference between groups of similar words. Try it for free as part of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary app

Draft an autobiographical outline. It should include information about your upbringing, impactful moments throughout your life, stories of failure and success, and meaningful mentors.

Begin with the easiest sections. Getting started is often the greatest hurdle, so begin by writing the chapters that feel most accessible or enjoyable.

Write your first draft. Once you write the first chapters, it will feel easier to write the rest. Capitalize on your momentum and write a full draft.

Step away. As with anything, stepping away from your work will help foster fresh perspectives when you return.

Edit and re-write your draft. Your first draft will probably benefit from thorough revisions, as will your second draft, and maybe your third. Continue to edit and revise until it feels right.

Ask for help. Bring in a trusted family member or friend or professional editor to help with final edits.

Further Resources on Autobiography

ThoughtCo. shares some important points to consider before writing an autobiography .

The Living Handbook of Narratology delves into the history of the autobiography .

MasterClass breaks autobiography writing down into eight basic steps .

Pen & the Pad looks at the advantages and disadvantages of the autobiography .

Lifehack has a list of 15 autobiographies everyone should read at least once .

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autobiography

a history of a person's life written or told by that person.

Origin of autobiography

Other words from autobiography.

au·to·bi·og·ra·pher, noun

Words Nearby autobiography

autoantigen
autobiographical
auto caption
autocatalysis
autocatharsis

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024

How to use autobiography in a sentence

In so doing, she gave us an autobiography that has held up for more than a century.

His handwritten autobiography reawakens in Lee a longing to know her motherland.

His elocution, perfected on stage and evident in television and film, make X’s autobiography an easy yet informative listen.

The book is not so much an autobiography of Hastings — or even Netflix’s origin story.

By contrast, Shing-Tung Yau says in his autobiography that the Calabi-Yau manifold was given its name by other people eight years after he proved its existence, which Eugenio Calabi had conjectured some 20 years before that.

Glow: The autobiography of Rick JamesRick James David Ritz (Atria Books) Where to begin?

Hulanicki was the subject of a 2009 documentary, Beyond Biba, based on her 2007 autobiography From A to Biba.

And it was also during the phase of the higher autobiography .

“Nighttime was the worst,” Bennett wrote in his autobiography .

Then I picked up a book that shredded my facile preconceptions—Hard Stuff: The autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young.

No; her parents had but small place in that dramatic autobiography that Daphne was now constructing for herself.

His collected works, with autobiography , were published in 1865 under the editorship of Charles Hawkins.

But there is one point about the book that deserves some considering, its credibility as autobiography .

I thought you were anxious for leisure to complete your autobiography .

The smallest fragment of a genuine autobiography seems to me valuable for the student of past epochs.

British Dictionary definitions for autobiography

/ ( ˌɔːtəʊbaɪˈɒɡrəfɪ , ˌɔːtəbaɪ- ) /

an account of a person's life written or otherwise recorded by that person

Derived forms of autobiography

autobiographer , noun

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Cultural definitions for autobiography

A literary work about the writer's own life. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa are autobiographical.

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As interesting as it may be writing about someone else's life, whether it be a fictional character's story or a non-fictional biography of someone you know, there is a different skill and enjoyment involved in sharing stories that are personal to you and showing others what it is like to experience life from your point of view.

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Many people hesitate to write accounts of their own life, in fear that their experiences are not worthy of attention or because it is too difficult to narrate one's own experiences. However, the truth is there is a much higher appreciation for self-written biographies, otherwise known as autobiographies. Let us look at the meaning, elements and examples of autobiography.

Autobiography Meaning

The word 'autobiography' is made of three words - 'auto' + 'bio' = 'graphy'

The word 'auto" means 'self.'
The word 'bio' refers to 'life.'
The word 'graphy' means 'to write.'

Hence the etymology of the word 'autobiography' is 'self' + 'life' + 'write'.

'Autobiography' means a self-written account of one's own life.

Autobiography: An autobiography is a nonfictional account of a person's life written by the person themselves.

Writing an autobiography allows the autobiographer to share their life story in the way that they have personally experienced it. This allows the autobiographer to share their perspective or experience during significant events during their lifetime, which may differ from the experiences of other people. The autobiographer can also provide insightful commentary on the larger sociopolitical context in which they existed. This way, autobiographies form an important part of history because whatever we learn about our history today is from the recordings of those who experienced it in the past.

Autobiographies contain facts from the autobiographer's own life and are written with the intention of being as truthful as memory allows. However, just because an autobiography is a non-fictional narrative does not mean that it does not contain some degree of subjectivity in it. Autobiographers are only responsible for writing about events from their life, the way they have experienced them and the way they remember them. They are not responsible for showing how others may have experienced that very event.

Mein Kampf (1925) is the infamous autobiography of Adolf Hitler. The book outlines Hitler's rationale for carrying out the Holocaust (1941-1945) and his political perspectives on the future of Nazi Germany. While this does not mean that his perspective is factual or 'right', it is a truthful account of his experiences and his attitudes and beliefs.

Autobiography Adolf Hitler Autobiography Examples StudySmarter

A key to understanding the meaning of an autobiography is realising the difference between a biography and an autobiography.

A biography is an account of someone's life, written and narrated by someone else. Hence, in the case of a biography, the person whose life story is being recounted is not the author of the biography.

Biography: A written account of someone's life written by someone else.

Meanwhile, an autobiography is also an account of someone's life but written and narrated by the very same person whose life is being written about. In this case, the person on who the autobiography is based is also the author.

Therefore, while most biographies are written from the second or third-person perspective, an autobiography is always narrated with a first-person narrative voice. This adds to the intimacy of an autobiography, as readers get to experience the autobiographer's life from their eyes - see what they saw and feel what they felt.

Here is a table summarising the difference between a biography and an autobiography:

Autobiography Elements

Most autobiographies do not mention every detail of a person's life from birth to death. Instead, they select key touchstone moments that shaped the autobiographer's life. Here are some of the essential elements that most autobiographies are made of:

This could include information regarding the autobiographer's date and place of birth, family and history, key stages in their education and career and any other relevant factual details that tell the reader more about the writer and their background.

Early experiences

This includes significant moments in the autobiographer's life that shaped their personality and their worldview. Sharing these with the readers, their thoughts and feelings during this experience and what lesson it taught them helps the readers understand more about the writer as a person, their likes and dislikes and what made them the way they are. This is usually how autobiographers connect with their readers, by either bringing forth experiences that the reader may identify with or by imparting them an important life lesson.

Many autobiographers dwell on their childhood, as that is a stage in life that particularly shapes people the most. This involves narrating key memories that the autobiographer may still remember about their upbringing, relationships with family and friends, and their primary education.

Professional life

Just as writing about one's childhood is a key area of focus in autobiographies, so are stories from an autobiographer's professional life. Talking about their successes and their progression in their chosen industry serves as a huge source of inspiration for those aspiring to go down the same career pathway. In contrast, stories of failures and injustices may serve to both warn the reader and motivate them to overcome these setbacks.

The HP Way (1995) is an autobiography by David Packard that details how he and Bill Hewlett founded HP, a company that began in their garage and ended up becoming a multi-billion technological company. Packard details how their management strategies, innovative ideas and hard work took their company towards growth and success. The autobiography serves as an inspiration and a guidebook for entrepreneurs in every field.

Overcoming adversity

As mentioned above, autobiographers often delve into stories of their life's failures and how they dealt with this setback and overcame it.

This is not only to inspire sympathy from their readers but also to inspire those facing similar problems in their lives. These 'failures' could be in their personal and professional lives.

Stories of failure could also be about overcoming adversities in life. This could be recovering from a mental illness, accidents, discrimination, violence or any other negative experience. Autobiographers may wish to share their stories to heal from their experiences.

I Am Malala (2013) by Malala Yousafzai is the story of how Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani girl, got shot by the Taliban at the age of 15 for protesting for female education. She became the world's youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2014 and remains an activist for women's right to education.

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Talking about culture involves discussions about the autobiographer's way of life. This means delving into their values and beliefs, traditions, customs, rituals and holidays that are practised by them and their family, the writer's language, food and clothing preferences and anything that may be 'normal' for the autobiographer, but unique to readers who do not belong to that culture.

This particular element also allows for identification, amongst people who belong to the same culture as the autobiographer, but also allows for an appreciation of diverse cultures.

Out of Africa (1937) is an autobiography by Karen Blizen where she details her life on a coffee plantation from 1914 to 1931 in Kenya, which was under British Empire at the time. It provides a picture of what life looked like during colonial rule in Africa.

Autobiographers often have a common theme or lesson running across the stories they have selected to include in their autobiographies. This is especially true for memoirs, a specific type of autobiography we will discuss in the next section.

On Writing (2000) is a memoir by American author Stephen King that is a collection of King's experiences as a writer. Hence, the underlying theme under all the experiences and events that he includes in this memoir either have had a profound impact on his writing career or serve as inspiration for aspiring writers.

Types of Autobiographies

Now that we have looked at the elements that make up an autobiography, let's look at the different types of self-written work that possess all the abovementioned elements.

Traditional autobiographies

This is when an autobiographer chronicles their entire lifetime, starting from their birth and early childhood, all the way to the present time when the book is being written. Most autobiographers opt for a chronological structure while narrating, although this is not necessary. While not each and every moment starting from the day of their birth needs to be included, the autobiographer must delve into any formative events occurring throughout the entire course of their life.

My Life (2004) is an autobiography by former U.S. President Bill Clinton chronicling his life, beginning with his childhood in Arkansas and then covering his tenure as the president of the United States.

Memoirs are a type of autobiography where the autobiographer only zooms in on particular memories that are significant or special to the author. Hence, memoirs are usually collections of memories handpicked by the author from their own life.

The memories that are selected are usually bound by a common theme.

autobiography is a story of a life; memoir is a story from a life. 1

Eat, Pray, Love (2006) is a collection of memoirs by Elizabeth Gilbert who writes about her various experiences while travelling across Italy, India and Indonesia, and the lessons she learnt along the way.

Fictionalised autobiographies

Remember when we said that autobiographies are always non-fictional? Well, there are some autobiographers who blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction while writing an autobiography!

While the events taking place in the autobiography are from the author's real life, the author may decide to use fictional characters to represent their actual experiences. Or, sometimes, an author may create a fictional character with a fictional story, but choose to narrate it like it is an autobiography by recording made-up (but very believable) facts about the character and tracing their psychological and social development throughout the course of their life. Sometimes, the author is so skilled at autobiographical writing, that readers are hardly able to tell that the protagonist and the life they are reading about are fictional!

Charles Dickens took an autobiographical approach while writing David Copperfield (1849), a novel where the substance of the book comes from Dickens' own life. However, the novel has been written in the first-person narrative voice of David Copperfield, who is a fictional character who also happens to be the protagonist of the story. Dickens reproduces his own life t hrough the story of David, a character that is a reflection of Dickens as a person.

Spiritual autobiographies

These autobiographies focus on the autobiographer's journey towards finding their faith and spirituality. It usually follows the narrative of the writer lacking faith or having lived a sinful youth. However, after numerous cycles of struggles, doubts, and repenting, the writer reconnects with their faith and undergoes a spiritual awakening.

Throughout the autobiography, the autobiographer shares stories of this conversion and attempts to spread God's message.

Left To Tell (2006) by Immaculée Ilibagiza is an autobiography where Ilibagiza details the story of her surviving the Rwandan Holocaust by hiding in a pastor's bathroom. She survives the genocide by possessing faith and trust, and by eventually learning to forgive those who murdered her family and friends.

Confessional autobiographies are written by people who usually have a hidden secret or a personal revelation that they wish to reveal. Some autobiographers have dark and painful secrets that they wish to share in order to seek redemption or to warn others from doing the same.

This could be anything from stories of struggling with addiction to committing a crime - anything that the autobiographer has been plagued with and wishes to get off their chest.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) narrates Thomas Quincy's struggle with drug addiction and the influence this has had on his life. He narrates instances from his childhood that acted as emotional factors leading to his addiction, the nightmares and visions he would have under the influence of the drug and even a contrasting picture of the allure of the drug and the pleasure and euphoria it affords. This is an extract from his autobiography:

The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, &c. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to conceive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience. ( pp. 103–104.)

Autobiography Books

Now let us look at a few famous examples of autobiographies.

The Story of My Life (1903) by Hellen Keller

In her autobiography, Hellen Keller details her struggles and journey following her blindness and deafness at a very young age. She describes her relationship with her teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan, who taught her how to cope and learn from her disability and enjoy life once again. She talks about her many adventures with Anne Sullivan, who taught her to appreciate nature and reading and built Hellen's confidence and determination. After overcoming several obstacles, Hellen grows up to become a successful and well-educated woman and is able to achieve all her dreams by the end of the novel.

This is a collection of diary entries written by Anne Frank from 1942 to 1944, where she details her life as a Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. She describes the two years she spent writing and studying in the Annex, a small refuge for her family and other Jewish people fleeing persecution. Anne's diary halts when the Annex is raided by the Nazis after which she and her family are sent to concentration camps. She died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, and her diary is one of the most poignant accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust.

This is an extract from one of her diary entries from October 9th, 1942:

Escape is almost impossible; many people look Jewish, and they’re branded by their shorn heads. If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilised places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die. I feel terrible. Miep’s accounts of these horrors are so heartrending… Fine specimens of humanity, those Germans, and to think I’m actually one of them! No, that’s not true, Hitler took away our nationality long ago. And besides, there are no greater enemies on earth than the Germans and Jews.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) by Maya Angelou

This autobiography is the first volume of a seven-volume autobiographical series written by Maya Angelou. It details her early life in Arkansas and her traumatic childhood where she was subjected to sexual assault and racism. The autobiography then takes us through each of her multiple careers as a poet, teacher, actress, director, dancer, and activist, and the injustices and prejudices she faces along the way as a black woman in America.

Autobiography Maya Angelou Autobiography Examples StudySmarter

Autobiography - Key takeaways

An autobiography is a nonfictional account of a person's life, written by the person themselves.
A biography is a written account of someone's life written by someone else, whereas an autobiography is a self-written account of one's own life story.
Key background information
Professional Life

Fictional autobiographies

Confessions

The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) by Anne Frank

Judith Barrington. 'Writing the Memoir'. The Handbook of Creative Writing . 2014
Fig. 1 - Adolf Hitler cropped restored (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adolf_Hitler_cropped_restored.jpg) by Unknown Author is licensed by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 de (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)
Fig. 2 - Malala Yousafzai at Girl Summit 2014 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Malala_Yousafzai_at_Girl_Summit_2014.jpg) by Russell Watkins/Department for International Development is licensed by Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
Fig. 3 - Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angelou_at_Clinton_inauguration_(cropped_2).jpg

Frequently Asked Questions about Autobiography

--> what are some examples of autobiography.

Some notable examples of autobiographies are:

--> What does autobiography mean?

An autobiography is a nonfictional account of a person's life, written by the person themselves.

--> What should I write in an autobiography?

While writing an autobiography, include key background information about you and your family, early experiences from your childhood, your culture, your professional life, stories of adversity and any other touchstone moments that shaped your life.

--> What is the difference between biography and autobiography?

A biography is a written account of someone's life by someone else, whereas an autobiography is a self-written account of one's own life story.

--> What are the different types of autobiographies?

The types of autobiographies are:

Define an autobiography.

An autobiography is a nonfictional account of a person's life, written by the person themselves.

What is the difference between an autobiography and a biography?

A biography is a written account of someone's life by someone else, whereas an autobiography is a self-written account of one's own life story.

Which type of autobiography includes fictional elements?

Which narrative voice are autobiographies written in?

First-person narrative voice

Which of the following autobiographies were written about the Holocaust?

What is a memoir?

A memoir is a type of autobiography where the writer zooms in on a particular collection of memories that are significant or special to the author.

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What is an Autobiography? Definition, Elements, and Writing Tips

POSTED ON Oct 1, 2023

Written by Audrey Hirschberger

What is an autobiography, and how do you define autobiography, exactly? If you’re hoping to write an autobiography, it’s an important thing to know. After all, you wouldn’t want to mislabel your book.

What sets an autobiography apart from a memoir or a biography? And what type of writing is most similar to an autobiography? Should you even write one? How? Today we will be discussing all things autobiographical, so you can learn what an autobiography is, what sets it apart, and how to write one of your own – should you so choose.

But before we get into writing tips, we must first define autobiography. So what is an autobiography, precisely?

Need A Nonfiction Book Outline?

This Guide to Autobiographies Contains Information On:

What is an autobiography: autobiography meaning defined.

What is an autobiography? It’s a firsthand recounting of an author’s own life. So, if you were to write an autobiography, you would be writing a true retelling of your own life events.

Autobiography cannot be bound to only one type of work. What an autobiography is has more to do with the contents than the format. For example, autobiographical works can include letters, diaries, journals, or books – and may not have even been meant for publication.

An autobiography is what many celebrities, government officials, and important social figures sit down to write at the end of their lives or distinguished careers.

Of course, the work doesn’t have to cover your whole life. You can absolutely write an autobiography in your 20s or 30s if you’ve lived through events worth sharing!

If an autobiography doesn’t cover the entire lifespan of the author, it can start to get confused with another genre of writing. So what’s an autobiography most similar to? And how can you tell it apart from other genres of writing? Let’s dive into the details.

What type of writing is most similar to an autobiography?

A memoir is undoubtedly what type of writing is most similar to an autobiography. So what is the difference between an autobiography vs memoir ?

Simply put, a memoir is a book that an author writes about their own life with the intention of communicating a lesson or message to the reader. It doesn’t need to be written in chronological order, and only contains pieces of the author’s life story.

An autobiography, on the other hand, is the author’s life story from birth to present, and it’s much less concerned with theme than it is with communicating a “highlight reel” of the author’s biggest life events.

In addition to memoirs, there is also some confusion between autobiography vs biography . A biography is a true story about someone’s life, but it is not about the author’s life.

Is an autobiography always nonfiction?

When many people define autobiography, they say it is a true or “nonfiction” telling of an author’s life – but that’s not always the case.

There is actually such a thing as autobiographical fiction .

Autobiographical fiction refers to a story that is based on fact and inspired by the author’s actual experiences…but has made-up characters or events. Any element in the story can be embellished upon or fabricated.

Even the information in a standard “nonfiction” autobiography should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, anything written from the author’s perspective may contain certain biases, distortions, or unconscious omissions within the text.

So if being nonfiction isn’t a defining characteristic of an autobiography, what is an autobiography defined by?

The key elements of an autobiography

What’s an autobiography like from cover to cover? It should contain these key elements:

A personal narrative : It is a firsthand account of the author's life experiences.
A chronological structure : An autobiography typically follows a chronological order, tracing the author's life from birth to present.
Reflection and insight : The book should contain the author's reflections, insights, and emotions about key life events.
Key life events : The book should highlight significant events, milestones, and challenges in the author's life.
Setting and context : There should be descriptions of the time period, cultural background, and environment to help the reader understand the author’s life.
Authenticity : The author should be honest and sincere in presenting their life story.
A personal perspective : An autobiography is written from the author's unique point of view.
A strong conclusion : The ending of the book should reflect on the author's current state or outlook.

Famous Autobiography Examples

Now that you know what an autobiography is, let’s look at some famous autobiography examples .

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)

The Diary Of Anne Frank, A Top Example For The Question: What Is An Autobiography?

Perhaps no autobiography is more famous than The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Her diary chronicles her profound thoughts, dreams, and fears as she hides with her family in the walls during the Holocaust.

Anne's words resonate with the enduring spirit of hope amid unimaginable darkness.

The Autobiography of Ben Franklin by Benjamin Franklin (1909)

One Of The Top Autobiographies, The Autobiography Of Ben Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin's autobiography follows Franklin’s life from humble origins to one of America's greatest forefathers. While originally intended as a collection of anecdotes for his son, this autobiography has become one of the most famous works of American literature.

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (1994)

One Of The Best Examples Of What An Autobiography Is, Long Walk To Freedom By Nelson Mandela

Long Walk to Freedom narrates Nelson Mandela's epic odyssey from South African prisoner to revered statesman. This masterpiece of an autobiography is a portrait of resilience against the backdrop of apartheid – and his words are a bastion for courage and human rights.

Now you know what an autobiography is, and some examples of successful autobiographies, so it’s time to discuss what goes into actually writing one.

Who Should Write an Autobiography?

Celebrity autobiographies are popular for a reason – the people who wrote them were already popular.

The main purpose of an autobiography is to portray the life experiences and achievements of the author. If you haven’t made any massive achievements that people are already aware of, an autobiography might not be for you. Instead, you should learn how to write a memoir .

After all, what’s an autobiography worth if no one reads it?

If you have made an important contribution to society, or have amassed a massive following of fans, then writing an autobiography could be a fabulous idea.

An autobiography is what allows you to claim your rightful place in history. It provides a legacy for your life, helps you to better understand your life’s journey, and can even be deeply therapeutic to write.

But then comes the next problem: how to write an autobiography.

Tips on Writing Your Own Autobiography

While memoirs are the books that teach life lessons, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give your autobiography meaning. The best autobiographies paint a vivid tapestry of personal growth and introspection.

You don’t just want to tell the reader about your life – you want them to feel like they are living it with you.

And it’s not just about painting a picture with your prose. A lot of thought should go into everything from autobiography titles to page count. To get started, here are five tips for writing an autobiography:

Know your audience : Understand who will read your autobiography and speak to them while writing.
Be candid and authentic : A life seen through rose-colored glasses isn’t relatable. You should include your failures as well as your triumphs, and humanize yourself so your story resonates with your reader.
Do your research : Of course you know what happened in your life, but how many details do you actually remember? You may need to sift through photos, archives, and diaries – and interview people close to you. Consider adding the photos to your book.
Identify key themes : Identify key events and life lessons that have shaped you. Reflect on how these themes have evolved over time.
Edit and edit again : Write freely first, then edit rigorously. Seek feedback from trusted individuals and consider professional editing to ensure clarity and coherence in your narrative. NO ONE writes perfectly the first time.

So there you have it, you are well on your way to understanding (and writing) an autobiography.

If you'd still like more guidance for writing your autobiography, you can check out our free autobiography template . We can’t wait for you to share your life story with the world.

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autobiography

Quick reference.

In its modern form, may be taken as writing that purposefully and self‐consciously provides an account of the author's life and incorporates feeling and introspection as well as empirical detail. In this sense, autobiographies are infrequent in English much before 1800. Although there are examples of autobiography in a quasi‐modern sense earlier than this (e.g. Bunyan's conversion narrative, Grace Abounding, 1666, and Margaret Cavendish', duchess of Newcastle's ‘A True Relation’, 1655–6) it is not until the early 19th cent. that the genre becomes established in English writing: Gibbon's Memoirs (1796) are a notable exception.

From 1800 onwards the introspective Protestantism of an earlier period and the Romantic Movement's displeasure with the fact/feeling distinction of the Enlightenment provided for personal narratives of a largely new kind. They were characterized by a self‐scrutiny and vivid sentiment that produced what is now referred to, following Robert Southey (1809), as autobiography . Early in the 19th cent. Wordsworth gives in The Prelude (1805) a sustained reflection upon the circumstances of he himself being the subject of his own work; and in the second half of the century Newman in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) publicly and originally reveals a personal spiritual journey. This latter, with its public disclosure of the private domain, had a dramatic and far‐reaching influence upon the intelligentsia of late Victorian society.

In the 20th cent. autobiography became increasingly valued not so much as an empirical record of historical events but as providing an epitome of personal sensibility among the intricate vicissitudes of cultural change. Vera Brittain achieved a seriousness of observation and affect to provide in Testament of Youth (1933) a major work on the conduct of the First World War. In the area of more domestic but no less social concerns J. R. Ackerley in his My Father and Myself (1968) constructed an autobiography of painful frankness in a disquisition upon his unusual family relations, his affection for his dog, and the tribulations of his homosexuality. More recently Tim Lott in The Scent of Dead Roses (1996) discussed the suicide of his mother and amalgamated autobiography, family history, and social analysis in a virtuoso performance of control and pathos. The truthfulness or not of autobiography is essentially a matter that must be left to biographers and philosophers. The plausibility of an autobiography, however, must find its authentication by the degree to which it can correspond to some approximation of its context.

From: autobiography in The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature »

Subjects: Literature

Princeton University Library

His 414: life-writing and history: diaries, memoirs and autobiographies.

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Finding Autobiographies in the Library
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What Is an Autobiography? Definition & 50+ Examples

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes in the lives of your favorite icons? Autobiographies offer us an intimate glimpse into the minds and hearts of those who’ve walked extraordinary paths.

These firsthand accounts of personal triumphs, challenges, and wisdom acquired along the way, illuminate the human experience in a profound and often surprising manner.

Join us as we journey through the pages of these literary treasures, unearthing the secrets that make them so compelling.

Table of Contents

Definition of Autobiography

An autobiography is a type of non-fiction writing that provides a firsthand account of a person’s life. The author recounts their own experiences, thoughts, emotions, and insights, often focusing on how these events have shaped their life. Typically structured around a chronological narrative, an autobiography provides a window into the author’s world

While autobiographies may be written for various reasons, including preserving personal history or sharing an inspiring story with others, they all aim to provide a genuine account of the author’s life.

Autobiographies can include stories of personal growth, challenges overcome, successes achieved, and important relationships. They often cover topics such as childhood, family life, education, career, personal struggles, and life-changing experiences.

It can portray both ordinary and extraordinary lives, allowing readers to connect with the author’s experiences and gain insights into their personal journeys.

Historical Overview

Autobiographies have a rich history, stemming from ancient times to the present day.

Early Examples

One of the earliest known examples of an autobiography is Augustine of Hippo’s “Confessions,” written in the 4th century AD. This seminal work is not only an important milestone in the development of the genre but also a deeply introspective and spiritual account of Augustine’s life and faith.

Born in 354 AD in Thagaste, Roman North Africa (modern-day Algeria), Augustine of Hippo was a Christian theologian and philosopher who became one of the most influential figures in the development of Western Christianity.

His “Confessions” were written between 397 and 400 AD, primarily as a testimony of his own personal conversion and growth in faith. The work is considered to be both a literary masterpiece and a foundational text in Christian theology.

Divided into thirteen books, the “Confessions” follows Augustine’s life chronologically, beginning with his childhood and progressing through his adolescence, early adulthood, and eventual conversion to Christianity.

The “Confessions” has been widely regarded as a groundbreaking work that laid the foundation for the autobiographical genre in Western literature. Its introspective and self-reflective style has influenced countless authors over the centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Henry Newman, and Thomas Merton.

Development Through the Centuries

By the early modern period, autobiographies became more widespread, with some of the best-known examples including:

Saint Teresa of Avila’s “The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself” chronicling the 15th-century Spanish mystic and Carmelite nun’s spiritual relationship with God.
“The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith” of John Smith in 16th-century, which recounts his experiences in the early days of the Virginia Colony and his encounters with Native Americans.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the genre continued to develop, with unique works such as:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Confessions”
Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden “
Frederick Douglass’ “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”

These important texts highlighted personal experiences, struggles, and social issues, shaping the autobiographical genre into what we recognize today.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, autobiographies span a wide range of themes and voices, including globally renowned works such as:

Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl”
Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom”

These works demonstrate how the genre has evolved to encompass diverse perspectives and life experiences.

Elements of an Autobiography

An autobiography contains several key elements that help readers understand the life story of the author.

Chronological Order

Chronological order is a common structure used in autobiographies as it allows readers to follow the author’s life events in a linear sequence. This format provides a clear and organized presentation of the author’s experiences and life stages, making it easier for the reader to follow and understand.

One of the primary benefits of using a chronological structure in an autobiography is that it mirrors the natural progression of a person’s life.

As readers move through the narrative, they can witness the author’s growth, the various influences that shaped them, and the crucial turning points that led to significant changes in their lives. This progression allows for a comprehensive understanding of the author’s personal journey and evolution.

Moreover, a chronological order in autobiographies can help to contextualize the author’s experiences within broader historical and cultural events.

By situating their lives within a specific time frame, authors can provide readers with a deeper understanding of the social, political, and cultural forces that influenced their experiences and decisions. This context helps to illuminate the unique circumstances and challenges faced by the author, as well as the ways in which their lives intersected with larger societal trends and issues.

First-Person Perspective

Autobiographies are written in first-person perspective, using “I” statements, as a means of conveying the author’s personal journey through their own eyes. This technique allows the author to provide personal insights, emotions, and opinions, creating a stronger connection between the reader and the author’s personal experiences.

One of the primary benefits of the first-person perspective in autobiographies is the immediacy it lends to the narrative. When authors share their experiences and emotions directly, they draw readers into their world, allowing them to experience events as the author did. This immersive quality can evoke empathy, curiosity, and a sense of connection between the reader and the author.

Furthermore, the use of “I” statements in autobiographies facilitates an authentic portrayal of the author’s voice and personality.

As readers encounter the author’s unique perspective, they gain insight into the author’s individual character, including their values, beliefs, and aspirations. This authenticity can help to establish credibility and trust, as readers come to understand the author’s experiences on a more personal level.

The first-person perspective in autobiographies also enables authors to reflect on their experiences and draw connections between past events and their present understanding.

Self-Reflection

A key aspect of autobiographies is self-reflection, which involves the author’s analysis of their experiences and growth throughout their life. This self-examination can reveal profound insights and lessons learned, offering value and inspiration to readers.

Self-reflection in autobiographies allows authors to delve deeper into their personal experiences and emotions, exploring the impact of those events on their character and worldview.

By examining their past actions, decisions, and relationships, authors can uncover patterns and recurring themes, shedding light on the factors that have shaped their identity and personal growth. This introspective process adds depth and nuance to the narrative, making it more relatable and engaging for readers.

Self-reflection can also contribute to the development of broader themes and life lessons within an autobiography. As authors analyze their experiences and the consequences of their choices, they often identify universal truths or insights that can resonate with readers from diverse backgrounds.

These themes may include the importance of perseverance , the value of self-discovery, or the transformative power of forgiveness, among others. By sharing these lessons, authors can offer readers valuable wisdom and guidance for their own lives.

Intimate Details

Intimate details are important in an autobiography, as they shed light on the author’s personality and emotions. These personal aspects of an individual’s life can provide readers with a deeper understanding and empathy towards the author’s journey.

By sharing the intricacies of their daily lives, relationships, and innermost thoughts, authors can create a more vivid and relatable portrayal of their experiences, allowing readers to connect with their story on a more personal level.

One reason intimate details are significant in an autobiography is that they humanize the author. By providing glimpses into their private lives, authors reveal their vulnerabilities, fears, desires, and joys.

This openness can help break down barriers between the author and the reader, fostering a sense of connection and empathy. As readers recognize shared emotions and experiences, they are more likely to develop a deeper understanding of the author’s life and perspective.

Types of Autobiographies

Traditional autobiographies.

Traditional autobiographies aim to provide an in-depth and personal view of the author’s life experiences, emotions, and thoughts. They are often structured in a chronological order, starting from the author’s childhood and progressing through various stages of their life, ultimately reaching the present day.

The author usually shares anecdotes, lessons learned, and personal growth experiences, which can inspire and educate readers.

Examples of traditional autobiographies:

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin (1791)

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is a classic piece of American literature written by one of the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin.

It was composed in four distinct parts over a period of nearly two decades, beginning in 1771 and ending in 1790, shortly before Franklin’s death. The autobiography provides a unique insight into the life, character, and values of one of the most influential figures in American history.

The autobiography is divided into four parts, each with its own focus and purpose:

Part One This section, written in 1771, covers Franklin’s early life, from his birth in 1706 to his early career as a printer in Philadelphia. He details his family background, childhood, and early experiences in the printing trade. He also includes some of his initial forays into writing and his early experiments with electricity.
Part Two Written in 1784, this section focuses on Franklin’s famous list of thirteen virtues, which he devised as a means of achieving moral perfection. These virtues are temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. Franklin also discusses the Junto, a mutual improvement society he founded, and his efforts to establish public services and institutions in Philadelphia, such as the first public library and the American Philosophical Society.
Part Three Penned in 1788, this part of the autobiography provides an account of Franklin’s role in the founding of the United States. It covers his involvement in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, his diplomatic missions to France during the Revolutionary War, and his eventual return to America.
Part Four In this brief, final section, written in 1790, Franklin reflects on his life and the writing of his autobiography. He expresses his hope that his story will inspire others and serve as a useful guide to future generations.

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (1994)

“Long Walk to Freedom” is an autobiography written by Nelson Mandela, a prominent anti-apartheid revolutionary, political leader, and philanthropist who served as the first black president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. The book was published in 1994, the same year Mandela was elected president.

The autobiography chronicles Mandela’s life from his early childhood in a small rural village in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, through his education and political awakening, to his 27 years in prison, and ultimately to his release and the establishment of a new democratic South Africa.

The book provides a detailed account of Mandela’s early life, including his family background and his experiences growing up in a traditional African setting.

It also delves into his education and professional life, during which he became increasingly involved in politics and the struggle against apartheid, a racially discriminatory system that segregated and oppressed the non-white population of South Africa.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah (2016)

“Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood” is an autobiographical comedy book written by Trevor Noah, a South African comedian and the host of The Daily Show, an American satirical news program.

The book, published in 2016, shares Noah’s life story growing up during the last years of apartheid and the turbulent times that followed as South Africa transitioned into a post-apartheid society.

The title “Born a Crime” refers to Noah’s own birth, as he was born to a black South African mother and a white Swiss father. At the time, his parents’ interracial relationship was considered illegal under the apartheid-era racial classification system, making Noah’s very existence a crime.

The book is a collection of 18 personal essays that delve into various aspects of Noah’s life. It explores his childhood experiences, such as growing up in Soweto, a South African township, learning to navigate the complexities of racial identity, and the challenges he faced due to his mixed heritage.

It also delves into Noah’s relationship with his strong-willed, fiercely independent mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, who played a pivotal role in shaping his life.

A memoir is a sub-type of autobiography that focuses on a specific aspect or period of a person’s life. It is usually more introspective and character-driven than traditional autobiographies, allowing authors to explore their experiences, emotions, and relationships in greater depth.

Memoirs often emphasize personal growth, self-discovery, and the lessons learned from the author’s unique experiences. Some examples of well-known memoirs include:

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (2005)

In “The Glass Castle,” Jeannette Walls recounts her extraordinary and often chaotic upbringing as the second oldest of four children in a highly unconventional family. Her parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, were unapologetically free-spirited, opting for a nomadic lifestyle that frequently left the family in poverty and uncertainty.

The memoir is an honest and poignant exploration of the impact of such a lifestyle on the family, touching on the importance of self-reliance, love, and forgiveness.

As they moved from town to town across America, the Walls family faced a plethora of challenges, including homelessness, hunger, and a lack of stability.

Throughout the memoir, Jeannette and her siblings develop an incredible resilience, learning to navigate their unpredictable world with resourcefulness and tenacity. They scavenge for food, devise ways to make money, and adapt to their ever-changing circumstances.

As the children grow older, they begin to question their parents’ choices and recognize the dysfunction within their family. Ultimately, they find the strength to break free and forge their paths in life.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed (2012)

In “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” Cheryl Strayed takes readers on a breathtaking and emotional journey as she embarks on a solo hike across the rugged Pacific Crest Trail (PCT).

Span miles from the Mojave Desert in California to the Bridge of the Gods on the border of Oregon and Washington, Strayed’s trek was a quest for healing and redemption following the death of her mother and the subsequent collapse of her marriage.

Throughout the memoir, Strayed shares her raw, honest reflections on the pain and grief she experienced, as well as the life choices that led her to the PCT. With each step on the trail, she grapples with the harsh realities of her past and the emotional baggage she carries with her.

As Strayed confronts the physical challenges of the trail, such as blistered feet, grueling climbs, and encounters with wildlife, she also faces an emotional and spiritual transformation that ultimately leads to profound self-discovery and growth.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)

In “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou shares the powerful story of her childhood and adolescence, growing up in the racially segregated South during the 1930s and 1940s.

The narrative follows young Maya and her brother, Bailey, as they navigate life in Stamps, Arkansas, raised by their strong-willed and loving grandmother, Momma, and their disabled Uncle Willie.

Throughout the memoir, Angelou confronts the harsh realities of racial prejudice and the limitations imposed on her and her community due to their skin color. Her experiences with discrimination, sexual assault, and the subsequent muteness that resulted from her trauma shed light on the challenges faced by Black individuals in a deeply divided society.

As Angelou grows older, she begins to question the injustices around her and develops a deep appreciation for literature and language. Through reading works by Black authors and immersing herself in the world of poetry, she gradually finds her voice and the strength to overcome her past traumas.

Angelou’s love for the written word not only empowers her but also sparks her passion for activism and the fight for civil rights.

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy (2022)

“I’m Glad My Mom Died” is an autobiography written by Jennette McCurdy, published in 2022. The book offers a candid and honest account of the life and experiences of the former Nickelodeon star, who is best known for her roles in popular TV shows like “iCarly” and “Sam & Cat.”

In the autobiography, McCurdy delves into her tumultuous relationship with her mother, Debra, who passed away in 2013 after battling cancer. The title of the book, while provocative, reflects the complicated emotions that McCurdy experienced throughout her life, as her mother’s death ultimately allowed her to break free from the control and manipulation she had experienced growing up.

Throughout the book, McCurdy explores her upbringing and the ways in which her mother’s controlling nature impacted her mental health, self-esteem, and overall well-being. She shares her struggles with anorexia, which she developed at a young age as a result of her mother’s fixation on her appearance and weight.

Additionally, McCurdy delves into her experiences as a child actor and the immense pressure she faced to succeed in the entertainment industry.

Educated by Tara Westover (2018)

In “Educated: A Memoir,” Tara Westover recounts her harrowing and inspiring journey from a life of isolation and abuse in rural Idaho to the halls of Cambridge University, where she ultimately earned a Ph.D. Born to a strict and domineering father with a mistrust of formal education and government institutions, Westover grew up in a household where schooling was forbidden and paranoia reigned.

Despite these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, she embarked on a courageous path to self-education and personal liberation.

The memoir provides a vivid portrayal of Westover’s childhood, marked by dangerous work in her family’s junkyard, physical and emotional abuse from her father and brother, and a near-total absence of formal education.

With unwavering determination, she taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to gain admission to Brigham Young University. Her pursuit of education exposed her to a world far beyond the confines of her family’s mountain home, leading her to question the beliefs and values she had been raised with.

Westover’s journey took her from Brigham Young University to Harvard and finally to Cambridge, where she earned a Ph.D. in history. Along the way, she faced the challenges of adjusting to unfamiliar social norms, reconciling her past with her newfound knowledge, and navigating the emotional turmoil of gradually breaking away from her family.

Psychological Illness

Autobiographies dealing with psychological illness delve into the challenges faced by individuals suffering from mental health disorders. These accounts offer a unique perspective on the daily struggles and triumphs of people dealing with such conditions, providing readers with valuable insights into the realities of living with mental illness.

By sharing their personal experiences, authors help to destigmatize mental health issues, raise awareness, and promote empathy and understanding. Some examples of autobiographies that focus on psychological illness include:

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison

An Unquiet Mind is a deeply personal and powerful memoir by Kay Redfield Jamison, who is not only a renowned clinical psychologist specializing in mood disorders, but also someone who has personally experienced the tumultuous journey of living with bipolar disorder.

Through her candid narrative, Jamison provides a rare, first-hand account of the struggles, triumphs, and complexities of this mental illness.

Jamison shares her story from the early onset of her symptoms in adolescence to her eventual diagnosis and the long road to finding an effective treatment. As a medical professional, she offers a unique perspective on the disorder, blending her clinical knowledge with her own intimate experiences.

Readers are given an inside look at the emotional rollercoaster of mania and depression, as well as the challenges faced in her personal relationships and professional life.

Jamison’s memoir also delves into the stigma surrounding mental illness, and the difficulties she faced in accepting her diagnosis and seeking help. By openly discussing her struggles, she aims to foster understanding and empathy for those who are affected by bipolar disorder, as well as their friends, families, and healthcare providers.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron (1989)

Darkness Visible is a powerful and deeply personal memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Styron, who chronicles his harrowing descent into the depths of clinical depression and his subsequent near-fatal suicide attempt.

Through this unflinching narrative, Styron sheds light on the often misunderstood and underestimated nature of depression, providing readers with an intimate understanding of the devastating effects it can have on an individual’s life.

In this poignant and raw account, Styron vividly details the insidious onset of his depression, the growing sense of despair and hopelessness that enveloped him, and his struggle to make sense of what was happening to him.

He also explores the various factors that may have contributed to his illness, including the loss of his mother, the stress of his literary career, and the side effects of medications he was taking.

Styron’s memoir serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of seeking help and support when grappling with mental illness. He recounts his journey through the mental health care system, his encounters with various professionals, and the eventual intervention of friends that ultimately saved his life.

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn R. Saks (2007)

“The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness” is a memoir written by Elyn R. Saks, a prominent legal scholar, professor, and mental health advocate. Published in 2007, the book offers an insightful and candid account of Saks’ life as she navigates her struggles with schizophrenia, a chronic and severe mental disorder characterized by disordered thoughts, hallucinations, and delusions.

The title of the memoir is inspired by the poem “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats, which contains the line “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” This line reflects Saks’ experience with her illness, as it often felt like her life was falling apart and her sense of self was slipping away.

Throughout the book, Saks shares her journey from the onset of her symptoms during her teenage years, to her time at Oxford University and Yale Law School, and her eventual career as a law professor at the University of Southern California.

She provides a firsthand account of her struggles with psychosis, hospitalizations, and the impact of her illness on her relationships, career, and sense of self.

It has been widely praised for its honest portrayal of schizophrenia and for helping to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness. The book offers a unique perspective into the mind of someone living with schizophrenia, and serves as a source of inspiration and hope for those who face similar challenges.

Confessional autobiographies are a form of literature where authors intimately share their personal experiences, including their mistakes, transgressions, and the consequences they faced as a result.

This type of writing often serves as a means for the author to achieve self-reflection, growth, and a sense of redemption. At the same time, it allows readers to empathize with the author’s journey and gain insights into the human condition.

Confessional autobiographies can be raw, honest, and sometimes shocking, but they often resonate deeply with readers due to their authenticity.

Examples of confessional autobiographies include:

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a 1965 autobiography that recounts the life of Malcolm X, a prominent African American leader, human rights activist, and one of the most influential figures in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

The book was co-authored by journalist and writer Alex Haley, who conducted a series of interviews with Malcolm X over a two-year period before his assassination in 1965.

The book provides a detailed account of Malcolm X’s life, including his early years, criminal past, conversion to Islam, and rise as a prominent leader within the Nation of Islam. It chronicles his evolving political and philosophical beliefs, his eventual disillusionment with the Nation of Islam, and his conversion to Sunni Islam after a transformative pilgrimage to Mecca.

The autobiography also delves into Malcolm X’s international travels, encounters with various world leaders, and his efforts to build a global human rights movement.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is an important work for several reasons:

It provides a unique and personal insight into the life and thoughts of a highly influential figure in American history.
It serves as a powerful account of the racial and social injustices faced by African Americans during the mid-20th century.
It explores themes of personal transformation, redemption, and the power of education to change one’s life.

The book has been highly regarded since its publication, and it has had a significant impact on the understanding of Malcolm X’s life and work, as well as on the broader Civil Rights Movement.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (2000)

“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is a memoir by American author Dave Eggers, published in 2000. The book is a blend of autobiography, fiction, and metafiction, recounting Eggers’ experiences after the death of both his parents from cancer within a span of five weeks.

In the wake of their deaths, the then-21-year-old Eggers is left to care for his 8-year-old brother, Toph. The memoir follows their journey together as they navigate grief, responsibility, and the challenges of creating a new life.

The narrative is characterized by Eggers’ innovative and unconventional writing style. He employs self-awareness, humor, and irony to explore themes of loss, family, and the search for identity. The book’s metafictional elements often break the fourth wall, as Eggers directly addresses the reader and critiques his own writing.

Spiritual Autobiographies

Spiritual autobiographies are unique in that they delve deeply into an individual’s spiritual life, exploring their encounters with the divine, struggles with doubt, and moments of profound insight. They often document the author’s transformative experiences and the lessons they’ve learned as they grow spiritually.

Here are two examples of spiritual autobiographies, each of which illustrates a different aspect of spiritual growth:

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton (1948)

“The Seven Storey Mountain” is an autobiography written by Thomas Merton, published in 1948. The book chronicles Merton’s life, spiritual journey, and eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism and entrance into the Trappist monastic order at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

The title is inspired by “The Dark Night of the Soul,” a poem by 16th-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, which uses the metaphor of a seven storey mountain to describe the soul’s ascent to union with God.

In the book, Merton recounts his early life, including his childhood and education in France, England, and the United States, as well as the deaths of both of his parents. He details his search for meaning and purpose, which initially led him to a hedonistic lifestyle and pursuit of worldly pleasures.

Merton’s life took a turn when he started studying at Columbia University, where he encountered influential figures, such as the Catholic writer and professor Dan Walsh, who introduced him to the works of prominent Catholic thinkers and mystics.

As Merton delved deeper into Catholicism, he experienced a profound spiritual awakening and felt a strong calling to the monastic life. He eventually entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, where he found peace and a sense of belonging.

The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda (1946)

“The Autobiography of a Yogi” is a spiritual classic written by Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian yogi and guru who introduced millions of Westerners to the teachings of meditation and Kriya Yoga through his book.

First published in 1946, the autobiography is an account of Yogananda’s life, his search for enlightenment, and his encounters with various saints and spiritual masters in India and beyond.

The book begins with Yogananda’s childhood in India, where he was born in 1893 as Mukunda Lal Ghosh. Early in life, he was drawn to spirituality and had mystical experiences that fueled his quest for spiritual truth.

As he grew older, he met his guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, who guided him in the practice of Kriya Yoga—a sacred meditation technique that accelerates spiritual growth by cleansing the body and mind of negative energy.

In the book, Yogananda recounts the teachings and wisdom he received from various spiritual figures such as his guru, Sri Yukteswar; the saintly Mahavatar Babaji, who is said to have revived Kriya Yoga; and Lahiri Mahasaya, who was a direct disciple of Babaji.

Yogananda also shares stories of other saints and spiritually advanced individuals he encountered, both in India and during his travels to the West.

Overcoming Adversities

Autobiographies centered around overcoming adversities provide readers with inspirational and motivational stories of individuals who have faced significant challenges in their lives. These memoirs often emphasize the themes of resilience, personal growth, and transformation as the authors share their personal journeys of overcoming various obstacles.

A Man Named Dave by Dave Pelzer (1999)

“A Man Named Dave: A Story of Triumph and Forgiveness” is a memoir written by Dave Pelzer, published in 1999. It is the third and final installment in his autobiographical trilogy, following “A Child Called ‘It'” (1995) and “The Lost Boy” (1997).

The series chronicles the author’s journey through a horrifically abusive childhood, his time in foster care, and ultimately his path to healing, redemption, and forgiveness.

“A Man Named Dave” picks up where “The Lost Boy” leaves off, as Dave Pelzer enters adulthood. The memoir details his life in the U.S. Air Force, his search for love, his struggles with trust and relationship issues, and his efforts to break the cycle of abuse that plagued his upbringing.

The book also delves into Dave’s attempts to reconcile with his abusive mother and the importance of forgiveness in the healing process.

Throughout the memoir, Dave shares his experiences and insights, highlighting the power of resilience, perseverance, and self-discovery. The book serves as an inspiration for those who have faced adversity and a reminder that forgiveness and personal growth are essential for healing from trauma.

The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner

“The Pursuit of Happyness” is a memoir written by Chris Gardner, published in 2006. The book tells the inspiring story of Gardner’s journey from homelessness and severe financial struggles to becoming a successful stockbroker and entrepreneur.

The memoir highlights the importance of determination, resilience, and the pursuit of happiness amidst life’s adversities.

In the book, Chris Gardner recounts his difficult childhood, marked by poverty, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. As an adult, Gardner finds himself struggling to provide for his son as a single father while also dealing with homelessness. Despite these challenges, he refuses to give up and remains determined to secure a better life for himself and his son.

Gardner’s journey takes a turn for the better when he secures an unpaid internship at the brokerage firm Dean Witter Reynolds. He faces numerous obstacles, including balancing his demanding work with caring for his son, finding shelter, and meeting their basic needs.

However, his hard work and perseverance eventually pay off, as he becomes a full-time employee and later starts his own brokerage firm, Gardner Rich & Co.

The book was adapted into a critically acclaimed film of the same name in 2006, starring Will Smith as Chris Gardner and Jaden Smith as his son. The film brought widespread attention to Gardner’s story, inspiring and motivating many people around the world.

Famous Examples

The world of autobiographies offers a plethora of captivating stories from various walks of life. In this section, we explore famous examples from historical figures, political figures, literary figures, and celebrities.

Historical Figures

Autobiographies of historical figures provide a glimpse into their personal lives and the events that shaped their legacies. Some standout examples include:

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
My Life by Golda Meir

Political Figures

Politicians often share their experiences, challenges, and accomplishments through autobiographies, offering a look into their minds and ideologies. Noteworthy examples are:

The Downing Street Years by Margaret Thatcher
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama
Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton
My Life by Bill Clinton
The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath by Ben S. Bernanke

Literary Figures

As masters of words, literary figures have created autobiographies filled with compelling insights and vivid details. Some distinguished examples include:

The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Celebrities

Autobiographies of celebrities offer a unique perspective on fame, art, and the weight of societal expectations. Some popular examples are:

Bossypants by Tina Fey
Open by Andre Agassi
Yes Please by Amy Poehler
My Life So Far by Jane Fonda
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling
The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish
The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher
Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis and Larry Sloman
Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living by Nick Offerman
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger
Me by Elton John

Purpose and Impact

The autobiography as a literary form has several purposes and impacts on both the author and the reader. Some of these purposes and impacts include self-reflection, sharing personal experiences, and influencing society and culture.

One of the primary purposes of writing an autobiography is self-reflection. Through the process of narrating their own lives, authors can reflect on their experiences and emotions, gaining insight into their personal development and growth. This self-reflection can lead to both greater self-awareness and ultimately, self-improvement.

Sharing Personal Experience

Another important aspect of autobiographies is the sharing of personal experiences. The authors use the written word as a means to share their unique perspectives, triumphs, and difficulties with a wider audience.

These personal narratives can offer valuable lessons and insights to readers, allowing them to empathize with the author’s experiences and potentially apply these insights to their own lives.

Influencing Society and Culture

Autobiographies can also have a profound impact on society and culture. By sharing their personal stories, authors can spark change, raise awareness of certain issues, or challenge societal norms and beliefs.

This influence on society and culture allows autobiographies to have a lasting impact beyond the individual lives depicted within their pages.

Challenges and Criticisms

Reliability.

One challenge often faced by autobiographies is the issue of reliability. Since the author is the subject of the story, there may be a tendency to portray themselves in a more favorable light or to omit certain details that could be perceived as negative.

For example, in the autobiography “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” Franklin may have omitted certain aspects of his life to maintain a positive public image.

Another challenge faced by autobiographies is the concept of truth. Autobiographical narratives can sometimes blur the lines between fact and fiction, making it difficult for readers to discern the accuracy of the story. A notable example of this is James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” which was later revealed to contain fabricated information.

Writing Your Own Autobiography

Writing an autobiography can be a rewarding and insightful experience, capturing your life’s journey and creating a record for future generations.

Finding Your Focus

Before you begin writing, it’s essential to identify the defining moments and themes in your life that you want to highlight. Reflect on your experiences and identify the most significant events that shaped who you are today.

Creating an Outline

An outline will provide structure to your autobiography, making it easier to navigate through your life’s chronology. Organize your outline by dividing it into sections such as childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, or by thematic categories specific to your life. This will help you present your story in a logical and coherent manner.

Developing Your Voice

Your voice as an autobiographer is essential, as it will set the tone and atmosphere of your narrative. Strive for a confident, knowledgeable, and neutral tone that authentically represents your experiences.

Revising and Editing

Revise and edit your autobiography carefully, ensuring that your writing is clear, concise, and engaging. This process not only includes checking for grammatical errors and factual inaccuracies but also enhancing the narrative flow and readability of your story.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can i write an autobiography about someone else.

If you are writing about someone else’s life, the work would be considered a biography rather than an autobiography. A biography is a narrative account of someone’s life written by someone other than the subject.

To write a biography, you’ll need to conduct thorough research, including interviews with the subject (if possible), their friends and family, and any relevant documents, such as letters, diaries, or published works.

Like an autobiography, a biography should be engaging and well-structured, offering readers insight into the subject’s life and experiences.

Can I collaborate with someone to write my autobiography?

Yes, collaborating with another writer or a professional ghostwriter is a common approach to writing an autobiography.

This process typically involves the subject sharing their life story through a series of interviews, conversations, or written correspondence, which the collaborator then uses as the basis for crafting the narrative.

Collaborating with a skilled writer can help ensure that your autobiography is well-structured, engaging, and professionally written, while still maintaining your personal voice and perspective.

Are there any legal or ethical considerations when writing an autobiography?

When writing an autobiography, it’s important to be aware of potential legal and ethical considerations, such as privacy and defamation.

Sharing personal information about others, especially if it could potentially harm their reputation or violate their privacy, can lead to legal issues. To avoid potential problems, it’s wise to:

– Seek permission from individuals whose stories you plan to include, especially if they involve sensitive or private information. – Use discretion when discussing the lives and experiences of others, considering the potential impact on their lives and relationships. – Ensure that your accounts of events and experiences are truthful and accurate, avoiding exaggeration or fabrication that could be construed as defamation.

Being mindful of these considerations will help you write a responsible and respectful autobiography that shares your story while minimizing potential risks.

Autobiographies provide a captivating glimpse into the lives of their authors, offering readers an intimate and authentic account of personal experiences, growth, and challenges.

From historical figures to everyday people, these self-written narratives reveal the human spirit’s resilience and the transformative power of personal reflection. By exploring the rich world of autobiographies, we can broaden our understanding of the diverse tapestry of human experiences, ultimately deepening our empathy and connection with others.

Whether you’re an aspiring writer or a curious reader, delving into the realm of autobiographies promises an enriching and enlightening journey.

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autobiography noun

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Earlier version

autobiography in OED Second Edition (1989)

What does the noun autobiography mean?

There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun autobiography . See ‘Meaning & use’ for definition, usage, and quotation evidence.

How common is the noun autobiography ?

How is the noun autobiography pronounced, british english, u.s. english, where does the noun autobiography come from.

Earliest known use

The earliest known use of the noun autobiography is in the late 1700s.

OED's earliest evidence for autobiography is from 1797, in the writing of William Taylor, reviewer and translator.

autobiography is formed within English, by compounding; perhaps modelled on a German lexical item.

Etymons: auto- comb. form 1 , biography n.

Nearby entries

autobasidium, n. 1895–
autobio, n. 1856–
autobiog, n. 1829–
autobiographal, adj. 1845–
autobiographer, n. 1807–
autobiographic, adj. 1818–
autobiographical, adj. 1807–
autobiographically, adv. 1822–
autobiographical novel, n. 1832–
autobiographist, n. 1820–
autobiography, n. 1797–
autobiopic, n. 1977–
auto body, n. 1904–
auto-boot, n. 1981–
auto-boot, v. 1984–
auto-booting, adj. 1983–
autobox, n. 1977–
autobracketing, n. 1985–
auto-burglar, n. 1884
autocade, n. 1924–
auto camp, n. 1904–

Meaning & use

The next dissertation concerns Diaries, and Self-biography . We are doubtful whether the latter word be legitimate: it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have seemed pedantic.

This very amusing and unique specimen of autobiography .

Geology (as Sir C. Lyell has so happily expressed it) is ‘the autobiography of the earth’.

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography .

The autobiography in your letter..has pleased me a good deal.

Dent's will be pleased to hear that my Welsh book, a sort of provincial autobiography , is coming on well.

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

The Cockney beauty's autobiography ..has become a surprise hit, debuting at number four in the best-seller lists.

story 1533– With possessive adjective or genitive. A person's account of the events of his or her life or a part of it. Cf. life story , n. , and also sense 8.
autography 1661– = autobiography , n. rare .
memoirs 1676– In plural . Autobiographical observations; reminiscences. Frequently modified by a possessive.
idiography a1734 Autobiography; writing about oneself. Obsolete . rare .
self-biography 1796– An account of the life of an individual written by himself or herself; an autobiography. Also: the genre comprising such work.
autobiography 1797– An account of a person's life given by himself or herself, esp. one published in book form. Also: the process of writing such an account; these…
reminiscence 1797– Chiefly in plural . A recollection or memory of a past fact or experience recounted to others; spec. (usually in plural ) a person's collective…
autobiog 1829– = autobiography , n.
autobio 1856– = autobiography , n.
auto 1881– = autobiography , n.
curriculum vitae 1902– A course; spec. a regular course of study or training, as at a school or university. (The recognized term in the Scottish Universities.) curriculum …
biodata 1947– ( plural ) biographical details, esp. summarizing a person's educational and employment history, academic career, etc.; (with singular agreement) =…
vita 1949– A biography, the history of a life; spec. = curriculum vitae n. at curriculum , n.
c.v. 1971– = curriculum vitae n. at curriculum , n.

Pronunciation

ð th ee
ɬ rhingy ll

Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence <petal> /ˈpɛtl/ but <petally> /ˈpɛtl̩i/.

a trap, bath
ɑː start, palm, bath
ɔː thought, force
ᵻ (/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ (/ʊ/-/ə/)

Other symbols

The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.

View the pronunciation model here .

* /d/ also represents a 'tapped' /t/ as in <bitter>

Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence <petal> /ˈpɛd(ə)l/ but <petally> /ˈpɛdl̩i/.

i fleece, happ y
æ trap, bath
ɑ lot, palm, cloth, thought
ɔ cloth, thought
ɔr north, force
ə strut, comm a
ər nurse, lett er
ɛ(ə)r square
æ̃ sal on

Simple Text Respell

Simple text respell breaks words into syllables, separated by a hyphen. The syllable which carries the primary stress is written in capital letters. This key covers both British and U.S. English Simple Text Respell.

b, d, f, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w and z have their standard English values

arr carry (British only)
a(ng) gratin
o lot (British only)
orr sorry (British only)
o(ng) salon

autobiography typically occurs about six times per million words in modern written English.

autobiography is in frequency band 5, which contains words occurring between 1 and 10 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands

Frequency of autobiography, n. , 1790–2010

* Occurrences per million words in written English

Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.

The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.

For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole , n.¹, mole , n.², mole , n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.

Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.

Frequency of autobiography, n. , 2017–2023

Modern frequency series are derived from a corpus of 20 billion words, covering the period from 2017 to the present. The corpus is mainly compiled from online news sources, and covers all major varieties of World English.

Compounds & derived words

autobiog , n. 1829– = autobiography, n.
autobiographal , adj. 1845– = autobiographical, adj.
autobio , n. 1856– = autobiography, n.
auto , n.³ 1881– = autobiography, n.

Entry history for autobiography, n.

autobiography, n. was revised in June 2011.

autobiography, n. was last modified in July 2023.

oed.com is a living text, updated every three months. Modifications may include:

further revisions to definitions, pronunciation, etymology, headwords, variant spellings, quotations, and dates;
new senses, phrases, and quotations.

Revisions and additions of this kind were last incorporated into autobiography, n. in July 2023.

Earlier versions of this entry were published in:

OED First Edition (1885)

Find out more

OED Second Edition (1989)

View autobiography in OED Second Edition

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Citation details

Factsheet for autobiography, n., browse entry.

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Writing My Autobiography

A re you still writing?” he asked.

“I am,” I answered.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

“An autobiography,” I said.

“Interesting,” he replied. “Whose?”

The implication here, you will note, is that mine hasn’t been a life sufficiently interesting to merit an autobiography. The implication isn’t altogether foolish. Most autobiographies, at least the best autobiographies, have been written by people who have historical standing, or have known many important people, or have lived in significant times, or have noteworthy family connections or serious lessons to convey . I qualify on none of these grounds. Not that, roughly two years ago when I sat down to write my autobiography, I let that stop me.

An autobiography, to state the obvious, is at base a biography written by its own subject. But how is one to write it: as a matter of setting the record straight, as a form of confessional, as a mode of seeking justice, or as a justification of one’s life? “An autobiography,” wrote George Orwell, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Is this true? I prefer to think not.

Autobiography is a complex enterprise, calling for its author not only to know himself but to be honest in conveying that knowledge. “I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Let him relate the events of his own life with Honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.” One of the nicest things about being a professor, it has been said, is that one gets to talk for fifty minutes without being interrupted. So one of the allurements of autobiography is that one gets to write hundreds of pages about that eminently fascinating character, oneself, even if in doing so one only establishes one’s insignificance.

The great autobiographies—of which there have not been all that many—have been wildly various. One of the first, that of the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, is marked by an almost unrelieved braggadocio: No artist was more perfect, no warrior more brave, no lover more pleasing than the author, or so he would have us believe. Edward Gibbon’s autobiography, though elegantly written, is disappointing in its brevity. That of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, heavily striking the confessional note, might have been told in a booth to a priest. Ben Franklin’s autobiography is full of advice on how the rest of us should live. John Stuart Mill’s is astounding in its account of its author’s prodigiously early education, which began with his learning Greek under his father’s instruction at the age of three. Then there is Henry Adams’s autobiography, suffused with disappointment over his feeling out of joint with his times and the world’s not recognizing his true value. In Making It , Norman Podhoretz wrote an autobiography informed by a single message, which he termed a “dirty little secret,” namely that there is nothing wrong with ambition and that success, despite what leftist intellectuals might claim, is nothing to be ashamed of.

Please note that all of these are books written by men. Might it be that women lack the vanity required to write—or should I say “indulge in”—the literary act of autobiography? In Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome , I recently read that Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, wrote her autobiography, which has not survived, and which Mary Beard counts as “one of the great losses of all classical literature.” I wish that Jane Austen had written an autobiography, and so too George Eliot and Willa Cather. Perhaps these three women, great writers all, were too sensibly modest for autobiography, that least modest of all literary forms.

A utobiography can be the making or breaking of writers who attempt it. John Stuart Mill’s autobiography has gone a long way toward humanizing a writer whose other writings tend toward the coldly formal. Harold Laski wrote that Mill’s “ Autobiography , in the end the most imperishable of his writings, is a record as noble as any in our literature of consistent devotion to the public good.”

If Mill’s autobiography humanized him, the autobiography of the novelist Anthony Trollope did for him something approaching the reverse. In An Autobiography , Trollope disdains the notion of an author’s needing inspiration to write well. He reports that “there was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office,” where he had a regular job. “I was free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession [that of novelist], I found it to be expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws.” Trollope recounts—emphasis here on “counts”—that as a novelist he averages forty pages per week, at 250 words per page. He writes: “There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn.” Trollope then mentions that on the day after he finished his novel Doctor Thorne , he began writing his next novel, The Bertrams . For a long spell the literati refused to forgive Trollope for shearing inspiration away from the creation of literary art, for comparing the job of the novelist to a job at the post office. Only the splendid quality of his many novels eventually won him forgiveness and proper recognition.

A serious biography takes up what the world thinks of its subject, what his friends and family think of him, and—if the information is available in letters, diaries, journals, or interviews—what he thinks of himself. An autobiography is ultimately about the last question: what the author thinks of himself. Yet how many of us have sufficient self-knowledge to give a convincing answer? In her splendid novel Memoirs of Hadrian , Marguerite Yourcenar has Hadrian note: “When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity.” The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the scrupulously examined one is rare indeed.

My own life has not provided the richest fodder for autobiography. For one thing, it has not featured much in the way of drama. For another, good fortune has allowed me the freedom to do with my life much as I have wished. I have given my autobiography the title Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life , with the subtitle Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life . Now well along in its closing chapter, mine, I contend, has been thus far—here I pause to touch wood—a most lucky life.

My title derives from the story of Croesus, who ruled the country of Lydia from circa 585–547 b.c. , and who is perhaps today best known for the phrase “rich as Croesus.” The vastly wealthy Croesus thought himself the luckiest man on earth and asked confirmation of this from Solon, the wise Athenian, who told him that in fact the luckiest man on earth was another Athenian who had two sons in that year’s Olympics. When Croesus asked who was second luckiest, Solon cited another Greek who had a most happy family life. Croesus was displeased but not convinced by Solon’s answers. Years later he was captured by the Persian Cyrus, divested of his kingdom and his wealth, and set on a pyre to be burned alive, before which he was heard to exclaim that Solon had been right. The moral of the story is, of course: Never say you have had a lucky life until you know how your life ends.

I have known serious sadness in my life. I have undergone a divorce. I have become a member of that most dolorous of clubs, parents who have buried one of their children. Yet I have had much to be grateful for. In the final paragraph of a book I wrote some years ago on the subject of ambition, I noted that “We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing.” In all these realms, I lucked out. I was born to intelligent, kindly parents; at a time that, though I was drafted into the army, allowed me to miss being called up to fight in any wars; and in the largely unmitigated prosperity enjoyed by the world’s most interesting country, the United States of America.

Writing is a form of discovery. Yet can even writing ferret out the quality and meaning of one’s own life? Alexis de Tocqueville, the endlessly quotable Tocqueville, wrote: “The fate of individuals is still more hidden than that of peoples,” and “the destinies of individuals are often as uncertain as those of nations.” Fate, destiny, those two great tricksters, who knows what they have in store for one, even in the final days of one’s life? I, for example, as late as the age of eighteen, had never heard the word “intellectual.” If you had asked me what a man of letters was, I would have said a guy who works at the post office. Yet I have been destined to function as an intellectual for the better part of my adult life, and have more than once been called a man of letters. Fate, destiny, go figure!

T he first question that arises in writing one’s autobiography is what to include and what to exclude. Take, for starters, sex. In his nearly seven-hundred-page autobiography, Journeys of the Mind , the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown waits until page 581 to mention, in the most glancing way, that he is married. Forty or so pages later, the name of a second wife is mentioned. Whether he had children with either of these wives, we never learn. But then, Brown’s is a purely intellectual autobiography, concerned all but exclusively with the development of the author’s mind and those who influenced that development.

My autobiography, though less than half the length of Brown’s, allowed no such luxury of reticence. Sex, especially when I was an adolescent, was a central subject, close to a preoccupation. After all, boys—as I frequently instructed my beautiful granddaughter Annabelle when she was growing up—are brutes. I came of age BP, or Before the Pill, and consummated sex, known in that day as “going all the way,” was not then a serious possibility. Too much was at risk—pregnancy, loss of reputation—for middle-class girls. My friends and I turned to prostitution.

Apart from occasionally picking up streetwalkers on some of Chicago’s darker streets, prostitution for the most part meant trips of sixty or so miles to the bordellos of Braidwood or Kankakee, Illinois. The sex, costing $3, was less than perfunctory. (“Don’t bother to take off your socks or that sweater,” one was instructed.) What was entailed was less sensual pleasure than a rite of passage, of becoming a man, of “losing your cherry,” a phrase I have only recently learned means forgoing one’s innocence. We usually went on these trips in groups of five or six in one or another of our fathers’ cars. Much joking on the way up and even more on the way back. Along Chicago’s Outer Drive, which we took home in those days, there was a Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer sign that read, “Have you had it lately?,” which always got a good laugh.

I like to think of myself as a shy pornographer, or, perhaps better, a sly pornographer. By this I mean that in my fiction and where necessary in my essays I do not shy away from the subject of sex, only from the need to describe it in any of its lurid details. So I have done in my autobiography. On the subject of sex in my first marriage (of two), for example, I say merely, “I did not want my money back.” But, then, all sex, if one comes to think about it, is essentially comic, except of course one’s own.

On the inclusion-exclusion question, the next subject I had to consider was money, or my personal finances. Financially I have nothing to brag about. In my autobiography I do, though, occasionally give the exact salaries—none of them spectacular—of the jobs I’ve held. With some hesitation (lest it seem boasting) I mention that a book I wrote on the subject of snobbery earned, with its paperback sale, roughly half-a-million dollars. I fail to mention those of my books that earned paltry royalties, or, as I came to think of them, peasantries. In my autobiography, I contented myself with noting my good fortune in being able to earn enough money doing pretty much what I wished to do and ending up having acquired enough money not to worry overmuch about financial matters. Like the man said, a lucky life.

If I deal glancingly in my autobiography with sex and personal finances, I tried to take a pass on politics. My own political development is of little interest. I started out in my political life a fairly standard liberal—which in those days meant despising Richard Nixon—and have ended up today contemptuous of both our political parties: Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, as the critic Dwight Macdonald referred to them. Forgive the self-congratulatory note, but in politics I prefer to think myself a member in good standing of that third American political party, never alas on the ballot, the anti-BS party.

Of course, sometimes one needs to have a politics, if only to fight off the politics of others. Ours is a time when politics seems to be swamping all else: art, education, journalism, culture generally. I have had the dubious distinction of having been “canceled,” for what were thought my political views, and I write about this experience in my autobiography. I was fired from the editorship of Phi Beta Kappa’s quarterly magazine, the American Scholar —a job I had held for more than twenty years—because of my ostensibly conservative, I suppose I ought to make that “right-wing,” politics. My chief cancellers were two academic feminists and an African-American historian-biographer, who sat on the senate, or governing board, of Phi Beta Kappa.

T he official version given out by Phi Beta Kappa for my cancellation—in those days still known as a firing—was that the magazine was losing subscribers and needed to seek younger readers. Neither assertion was true, but both currently appear in the Wikipedia entry under my name. The New York Times also printed this “official” but untrue version of my cancellation. In fact, I was canceled because I had failed to run anything in the magazine about academic feminism or race, both subjects that had already been done to death elsewhere and that I thought cliché-ridden and hence of little interest for a magazine I specifically tried to keep apolitical. During my twenty-two years at the American Scholar , the name of no current United States president was mentioned. If anything resembling a theme emerged during my editorship, it was the preservation of the tradition of the liberal arts, a subject on which I was able to acquire contributions from Jacques Barzun, Paul Kristeller, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Frederick Crews, and others.

That I was fired not for anything I had done but for things I had failed to do is an indication of how far we had come in the realm of political correctness. I take up this topic in my autobiography, one theme of which is the vast changes that have taken place in American culture over my lifetime. A notable example is an essay on homosexuality that I wrote and published in Harper’s in 1970, a mere fifty-three years ago. The essay made the points that we still did not know much about the origin of male homosexuality, that there was much hypocrisy concerning the subject, that homosexuals were living under considerable social pressure and prejudice, and that given a choice, most people would prefer that their children not be homosexual. This, as I say, was in 1970, before the gay liberation movement had got underway in earnest. The essay attracted a vast number of letters in opposition, and a man named Merle Miller, who claimed I was calling for genocide of homosexuals, wrote a book based on the essay. Gore Vidal, never known for his temperate reasoning, claimed my argument was ad Hitlerum . (Vidal, after contracting Epstein-Barr virus late in life, claimed that “Joseph Epstein gave it to me.”) I have never reprinted the essay in any of my collections because I felt that it would stir up too much strong feeling. For what it is worth, I also happen to be pleased by the greater tolerance accorded homosexuality in the half century since my essay was published.

The larger point is that today neither Harper’s nor any other mainstream magazine would dare to publish that essay. Yet a few years after the essay was published, I was offered a job teaching in the English Department of Northwestern University, and the year after that, I was appointed editor of the American Scholar. Today, of course, neither job would have been available to me.

Do these matters—my cancellation from the American Scholar , my unearned reputation as a homophobe—come under the heading of self-justification? Perhaps so. But then, what better, or at least more convenient, place to attempt to justify oneself than in one’s autobiography?

Many changes have taken place in my lifetime, some for the better, some for the worse, some whose value cannot yet be known. I note, for example, if not the death then the attenuation of the extended family (nephews, nieces, cousins) in American life. Whereas much of my parents’ social life revolved around an extensive cousinage, I today have grandnephews and grandnieces living on both coasts whom I have never met and probably never shall. I imagine some of them one day being notified of my death and responding, “Really? [Pause] What’s for dinner?”

I take up in my autobiography what Philip Rieff called, in his book of this title, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, a development that has altered child-rearing, artistic creation, and much else in our culture. Although the doctrines of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others are no longer taken as gospel, their secondary influence has conquered much of modern culture. My parents’ generation did not hold with therapeutic culture, which contends that the essentials of life are the achievement of self-esteem and individual happiness, replacing honor, courage, kindness, and generosity.

In my autobiography, I note that when my mother was depressed by her knowledge that she was dying of cancer, a friend suggested that there were support groups for people with terminal diseases, one of which might be helpful. I imagined telling my mother about such groups, and her response: “Let me see,” she is likely to have said. “You want me to go into a room with strangers, where I will listen to their problems and then I’ll tell them mine, and this will make me feel better.” Pause. “Is this the kind of idiot I’ve raised as a son?”

T hen there is digital culture, the verdict on which is not yet in. Digital culture has changed the way we read, think, make social connections, do business, and so much more. I write in my autobiography that in its consequences digital culture is up there with the printing press and the automobile. Its influence is still far from fully fathomed.

One of my challenges in writing my autobiography was to avoid seeming to brag about my quite modest accomplishments. In the Rhetoric , Aristotle writes: “Speaking at length about oneself, making false claims, taking the credit for what another has done, these are signs of boastfulness.” I tried not to lapse into boasting. Yet at one point I quote Jacques Barzun, in a letter to me, claiming that as a writer I am in the direct line of William Hazlitt, though in some ways better, for my task—that of finding the proper language to establish both intimacy and critical distance—is in the current day more difficult than in Hazlitt’s. At least I deliberately neglected to mention that, in response to my being fired from the American Scholar, Daniel Patrick Moynihan flew an American flag at half-mast over the Capitol, a flag he sent to me as a souvenir. Quoting others about my accomplishments, is this anything other than boasting by other means? I hope so, though even now I’m not altogether sure.

I have a certain pride in these modest accomplishments. Setting out in life, I never thought I should publish some thirty-odd books or have the good luck to continue writing well into my eighties. The question for me as an autobiographer was how to express that pride without preening. The most efficient way, of course, is never to write an autobiography.

Why, then, did I write mine? Although I have earlier characterized writing as a form of discovery, I did not, in writing my autobiography, expect to discover many radically new things about my character or the general lineaments of my life. Nor did I think that my life bore any lessons that were important to others. I had, and still have, little to confess; I have no hidden desire to be spanked by an NFL linebacker in a nun’s habit. A writer, a mere scribbler, I have led a largely spectatorial life, standing on the sidelines, glass of wine in hand, watching the circus pass before me.

Still, I wrote my autobiography, based in a loose way on Wordsworth’s notion that poetry arises from “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Writing it gave me an opportunity to review my life at the end of my life in a tranquil manner. I was able to note certain trends, parallels, and phenomena that have marked my life and set my destiny.

The first of these, as I remarked earlier, was the fortunate time in which I was born, namely the tail end of the Great Depression—to be specific, in 1937. Because of the Depression, people were having fewer children, and often having them later. (My mother was twenty-seven, my father thirty at my birth.) Born when it was, my generation, though subject to the draft—not, in my experience of it, a bad thing—danced between the wars: We were too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam. We were also children during World War II, the last war the country fully supported, which gave us a love of our country. Ours was a low-population generation, untroubled by the vagaries of college admissions or the trauma of rejection by the school of one’s choice. Colleges, in fact, wanted us.

Or consider parents, another fateful phenomenon over which one has no choice. To be born to thoughtless, or disagreeable, or depressed, or deeply neurotic parents cannot but substantially affect all one’s days. Having a father who is hugely successful in the world can be as dampening to the spirit as having a father who is a failure. And yet about all this one has no say. I have given the chapter on my parents the title “A Winning Ticket in the Parents Lottery,” for my own parents, though neither went to college, were thoughtful, honorable, and in no way psychologically crushing. They gave my younger brother and me the freedom to develop on our own; they never told me what schools to attend, what work to seek, whom or when to marry. I knew I was never at the center of my parents’ lives, yet I also knew I could count on them when I needed their support, which more than once I did, and they did not fail to come through. As I say, a winning ticket.

As one writes about one’s own life, certain themes are likely to emerge that hadn’t previously stood out so emphatically. In my case, one persistent motif is that of older boys, then older men, who have supported or aided me in various ways. A boy nearly two years older than I named Jack Libby saw to it that I wasn’t bullied or pushed around in a neighborhood where I was the youngest kid on the block. In high school, a boy to whom I have given the name Jeremy Klein taught me a thing or two about gambling and corruption generally. Later in life, men eight, nine, ten, even twenty or more years older than I promoted my career: Hilton Kramer in promoting my candidacy for the editorship of the American Scholar , Irving Howe in helping me get a teaching job (without an advanced degree) at Northwestern, John Gross in publishing me regularly on important subjects in the Times Literary Supplement , Edward Shils in ways too numerous to mention. Something there was about me, evidently, that was highly protégéable.

I haven’t yet seen the index for my autobiography, but my guess is that it could have been name-ier. I failed, for example, to include my brief but pleasing friendship with Sol Linowitz. Sol was the chairman of Xerox, and later served the Johnson administration as ambassador to the Organization of American States. He also happened to be a reader of mine, and on my various trips to Washington I was often his guest at the F Street Club, a political lunch club where he reserved a private room in which we told each other jokes, chiefly Jewish jokes. I might also have added my six years as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose members included the actors Robert Stack and Celeste Holm, the Balanchine dancer Arthur Mitchell, Robert Joffrey, the soprano Renée Fleming, the novelist Toni Morrison, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, the architect I. M. Pei, the painter Helen Frankenthaler, and other highly droppable names.

Confronting one’s regrets is another inescapable element in writing one’s autobiography. Ah, regrets: the red MG convertible one didn’t buy in one’s twenties, the elegant young Asian woman one should have asked to dinner, the year one failed to spend in Paris. The greater the number of one’s regrets, the grander their scope, the sadder, at its close, one’s life figures to be. I come out fairly well in the regrets ledger. I regret not having studied classics at university, and so today I cannot read ancient Greek. I regret not having been a better father to my sons. I regret not asking my mother more questions about her family and not telling my father what a good man I thought he was. As regrets go, these are not minor, yet neither have I found them to be crippling.

Then there is the matter of recognizing one’s quirks, or peculiar habits. A notable one of mine, acquired late in life, is to have become near to the reverse of a hypochondriac. I have not yet reached the stage of anosognosia, or the belief that one is well when one is ill—a stage, by the way, that Chekhov, himself a physician, seems to have attained. I take vitamins, get flu and Covid shots, and watch what I eat, but I try to steer clear of physicians. This tendency kicked in not long after my decades-long primary care physician retired. In his The Body: A Guide for Occupants , Bill Bryson defines good health as the health enjoyed by someone who hasn’t had a physical lately. The ancients made this point more directly, advising bene caca et declina medicos (translation on request) . For a variety of reasons, physicians of the current day are fond of sending patients for a multiplicity of tests: bone density tests, colonoscopies, biopsies, X-rays of all sorts, CT scans, MRIs, stopping only at SATs. I am not keen to discover ailments that don’t bother me. At the age of eighty-seven, I figure I am playing with house money, and I have no wish to upset the house by prodding my health in search of imperfections any more than is absolutely necessary.

The older one gets, unless one’s life is lived in pain or deepest regret, the more fortunate one feels. Not always, not everyone, I suppose. “The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum,” said George Bernard Shaw, who lived to age ninety-four. Though the world seems to be in a hell of a shape just now, I nonetheless prefer to delay my exit for as long as I can. I like it here, continue to find much that is interesting and amusing, and have no wish to depart the planet.

Still, with advancing years I have found my interests narrowing. Not least among my waning interests is that in travel. I like my domestic routine too much to abandon it for foreign countries where the natives figure to be wearing Air Jordan shoes, Ralph Lauren shirts, and cargo pants. Magazines that I once looked forward to, many of which I have written for in the past, no longer contain much that I find worth reading. A former moviegoer, I haven’t been to a movie theater in at least a decade. The high price of concert and opera tickets has driven me away. The supposedly great American playwrights—Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee—have never seemed all that good to me, and I miss them not at all. If all this sounds like a complaint that the culture has deserted me, I don’t feel that it has. I can still listen to my beloved Mozart on discs, read Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Willa Cather, and the other great novelists, watch the splendid movies of earlier days on Turner Classics and HBO—live, in other words, on the culture of the past.

“Vho needs dis?” Igor Stravinsky is supposed to have remarked when presented with some new phenomena of the avant-garde or other work in the realm of art without obvious benefit. “Vho needs dis?” is a question that occurred to me more than once or twice as I wrote my autobiography. All I can say is that those who read my autobiography will read of the life of a man lucky enough to have devoted the better part of his days to fitting words together into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays and stories on a wide variety of topics. Now in his autobiography all the sentences and paragraphs are about his own life. He hopes that these sentences are well made, these paragraphs have a point, and together they attain to a respectable truth quotient, containing no falsehoods whatsoever. He hopes that, on these modest grounds at least, his autobiography qualifies as worth reading.

Joseph Epstein is author of Gallimaufry , a collection of essays and reviews.

Image by Museum Rotterdam on Wikimedia Commons , licensed via Creative Commons . Image cropped.

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John Barth, novelist who orchestrated literary fantasies, dies at 93

His comic novels and metafictional stories made him a giant of postmodernism.

John Barth, a novelist who crafted labyrinthine, fantastical tales that were at once bawdy and philosophical, placing him on the cutting edge of the postmodern literary movement, died April 2. He was 93.

His death was announced in a statement by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he was a longtime faculty member. The statement did not say where or how he died.

Mr. Barth was the author of about 20 books, among them the short-story collection “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968), a landmark of experimental fiction, and the comic novels “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960) and “Giles Goat-Boy” (1966).

The former was included on Time magazine’s 2010 list of the 100 greatest English-language novels, and in 1973 Mr. Barth won a National Book Award for “Chimera,” a collection of three interrelated novellas that retold the mythical stories of Perseus, Bellerophon and Scheherazade. (Mr. Barth, not for the last time, appeared as a character in the work, making a cameo as a smiling genie who offers Scheherazade, or “Sherry,” fresh material for the stories she tells each night.)

Despite such acclaim, Mr. Barth’s books were sometimes criticized by peers as academic, pretentious and willfully obtuse. Where novelist John Updike offered praise, favorably comparing the marital dramas of “Chimera” to his own work about domestic discontent, writer Gore Vidal offered a scathing assessment: Mr. Barth’s books, he said , were “written to be taught, not to be read.”

Mr. Barth was, in fact, for many years a professor, teaching English and creative writing at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins. While he saw himself as a teacher as much as an author, he believed he was writing squarely in the tradition of storytellers such as Homer, Virgil and the imprisoned character of Scheherazade, whose storytelling prowess led her captor to spare her life.

He was, he said, a kind of literary arranger, enacting in literature what he had briefly done in his youth as an orchestrator for a jazz band.

“An arranger is a chap who takes someone else’s melody and turns it to his purpose,” Mr. Barth told the Paris Review in 1985. “For better or worse, my career as a novelist has been that of an arranger. My imagination is most at ease with an old literary convention like the epistolary novel, or a classical myth — received melody lines, so to speak, which I then reorchestrate to my purpose.”

Mr. Barth’s “reorchestrations” made him one of the foremost practitioners of postmodern literature, a movement that he helped define as the blending of straightforward storytelling techniques with the involuted, playful, frequently self-referential devices of modernists such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

He was perhaps at his postmodern best — or worst, depending on one’s tastes — in “Lost in the Funhouse,” the title piece of his first story collection and a formative influence on the late David Foster Wallace .

The story shifts seamlessly between a traditional narrative — about a young boy’s trip to a hall of mirrors, located at a beach resort near Mr. Barth’s hometown on the Eastern Shore of Maryland — and observations on the nature of narrative itself.

A story, Mr. Barth seemed to suggest, was itself a kind of funhouse, one in which readers are made to believe that they are experiencing something real and true, rather than an artifice constructed out of words on a page.

“So far there’s been no real dialogue, very little sensory detail, and nothing in the way of a theme ,” the story’s narrator observes early in the piece. “And a long time has gone by already without anything happening; it makes a person wonder. We haven’t even reached Ocean City yet: we will never get out of the funhouse.”

John Simmons Barth, whose father owned a candy store, was born in Cambridge, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, on May 27, 1930. He went by Jack, complementing his twin sister, Jill.

Mr. Barth played the drums in a local jazz group and briefly studied orchestration at Juilliard music school in New York before transferring to Johns Hopkins.

“As an illiterate undergraduate,” he once told the New York Herald Tribune, “I worked off part of my tuition filing books in the Classics Library at Johns Hopkins, which included the stacks of the Oriental Seminary. One was permitted to get lost for hours in that splendiferous labyrinth and intoxicate, engorge oneself with story.”

His interest was in narrative: sprawling epics such as “The Ocean of the Rivers of Story,” a multivolume work originally written in Sanskrit; Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron”; and Richard Burton’s translation of “The Thousand Nights and a Night,” which taught him how to pace epics and led to a fascination with stories within stories.

After graduating from Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in 1951 and a master’s in English in 1952, he planned a trilogy of short realist novels to address themes of suicide and nihilism.

The first two volumes — “The Floating Opera” (1956) and “The End of the Road” (1958) — were well-received but left Mr. Barth feeling unsatisfied. While teaching at Penn State, he later told The Washington Post, “I realized that realism was tying my hands.”

He responded by ditching plans for his third novel and — finding the playful, parodic voice that dominated most of his later work — launching himself to literature’s experimental fringe.

The result was “The Sot-Weed Factor,” a darkly funny, 800-page satire of Colonial Maryland that drew inspiration from a 1708 poem of the same name. In Mr. Barth’s telling, the poem’s author — a “rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke” — was a naive idealist grappling with the growing awareness that human existence is grim, fraught with violence and lacking in apparent purpose and meaning.

Written in the style of picaresque novels such as Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” and Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” the novel was “not for all palates,” the novelist and critic Edmund Fuller wrote in a review for the New York Times: “The plot itself is a parody in its incalculable complexity; a tissue of intrigue and counter-intrigue, ludicrous mock-heroic adventure, masquerades and confusions of identity.”

Mr. Barth’s follow-up, “Giles Goat-Boy,” was nearly as lengthy and even more outlandish. The book, its author once explained, was “a farcical allegory . . . of a goat sired by a virginal librarian on a computer.”

Improbably, it landed on the Times bestseller list for 12 weeks, helped along by praise from literary critics such as Robert Scholes, who hailed Mr. Barth as “a comic genius of the highest order” in a front-page review in the Times Book Review.

Mr. Barth continued his hyper-intellectual strain of writing in “Letters” (1979), a parody of epistolary novels that featured imagined correspondence between Mr. Barth and characters of his previous works, before turning to a more straightforward style in “Sabbatical” (1982).

The book was Mr. Barth’s most openly political work, and included about 20 pages of news clippings from the Baltimore Sun about John Paisley, a former CIA official whose body was discovered in the Chesapeake Bay in 1978, spawning conspiracy theories that he was silenced by the intelligence agency.

It also seemed to include elements of autobiography. Its protagonists were a husband and wife who, like Mr. Barth and his own wife, the former Shelly Rosenberg, sailed across the Chesapeake. (Mr. Barth, the owner of a 25-foot fiberglass sailboat, once told The Post that “one of the purposes of art is to give you boats you can’t afford.”)

A previous marriage, to Harriet Anne Strickland, ended in divorce. He had children, but information on survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Barth received some of the most glowing reviews of his career for “The Tidewater Tales” (1987), a sequel of sorts to “Sabbatical.” The novel featured another husband and wife, this time with a male protagonist who appeared to be Mr. Barth’s literary opposite: a minimalist author who finds Shakespeare’s remark “Brevity is the soul of wit” to be “five-sixths too garrulous.”

The book, like his earlier work “Chimera,” featured a cameo from the mythical Scheherazade, whom Mr. Barth described as his “literary patron saint.”

“We like to imagine that our lives make sense, and storytelling is one way of ordering events,” he told the Times in 1982. “Of course, Scheherazade literally has to keep telling stories or she’s kaput. In a less dramatic way, that’s true of every writer in the world — you’re only as good as your next story.”

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Autobiography Definition & Meaning
autobiography: [noun] the biography of a person narrated by himself or herself.
Autobiography
autobiography, the biography of oneself narrated by oneself. Autobiographical works can take many forms, from the intimate writings made during life that were not necessarily intended for publication (including letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and reminiscences) to a formal book-length autobiography.. Formal autobiographies offer a special kind of biographical truth: a life, reshaped by ...
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
AUTOBIOGRAPHY definition: 1. a book about a person's life, written by that person: 2. the area of literature relating to…. Learn more.
What Is an Autobiography? (And How to Write Yours)
The word autobiography literally means SELF (auto), LIFE (bio), WRITING (graph). Or, in other words, an autobiography is the story of someone's life written or otherwise told by that person. When writing your autobiography, find out what makes your family or your experience unique and build a narrative around that.
Autobiography
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.
Autobiography
Autobiography is one type of biography, which tells the life story of its author, meaning it is a written record of the author's life. Rather than being written by somebody else, an autobiography comes through the person's own pen, in his own words.
Definition and Examples of Autobiography
"Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people." (attributed to Thomas Carlyle, Philip Guedalla, and others) Autobiography and Memoir - "An autobiography is the story of a life: the name implies that the writer will somehow attempt to capture all the essential elements of that life. A writer's autobiography, for ...
Autobiography: Definition and Examples
Definition & Examples. I. What is Autobiography? An autobiography is a self-written life story. It is different from a biography, which is the life story of a person written by someone else. Some people may have their life story written by another person because they don't believe they can write well, but they are still considered an author ...
autobiography noun
the story of a person's life, written by that person; this type of writing. In his autobiography, he recalls the poverty he grew up in. compare biography Topics Literature and writing b2
Autobiography in Literature: Definition & Examples
Autobiography Definition. An autobiography (awe-tow-bye-AWE-gruh-fee) is a self-written biography. The author writes about all or a portion of their own life to share their experience, frame it in a larger cultural or historical context, and/or inform and entertain the reader. Autobiographies have been a popular literary genre for centuries.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY Definition & Usage Examples
Autobiography definition: . See examples of AUTOBIOGRAPHY used in a sentence.
Autobiography Definition, Examples, and Writing Guide
The strict definition of autobiography is a first-person account of its author's entire life. A memoir does not document the memoirist's full life story but rather a selected era or a specific multi-era journey within that author's life. Memoirs tend to be much more focused than autobiographies. The main difference between memoir and ...
Autobiography: definition and examples
autobiography, Biography of oneself narrated by oneself. Little autobiographical literature exists from antiquity and the Middle Ages; with a handful of exceptions, the form begins to appear only in the 15th century. Autobiographical works take many forms, from intimate writings made during life that are not necessarily intended for publication ...
AUTOBIOGRAPHY definition
AUTOBIOGRAPHY meaning: 1. a book about a person's life, written by that person: 2. the area of literature relating to…. Learn more.
Autobiography
An autobiography is a kind of literary nonfiction, which means it is a factual story that features real people and events. It also has features like plot, character, and setting that are common in ...
Autobiography: Meaning, Examples & Type
A key to understanding the meaning of an autobiography is realising the difference between a biography and an autobiography. A biography is an account of someone's life, written and narrated by someone else. Hence, in the case of a biography, the person whose life story is being recounted is not the author of the biography. ...
What is An Autobiography?: Definition & Writing Tips
Autobiography Meaning Defined. What is an autobiography? It's a firsthand recounting of an author's own life. So, if you were to write an autobiography, you would be writing a true retelling of your own life events. Autobiography cannot be bound to only one type of work. What an autobiography is has more to do with the contents than the format.
Autobiography
In its modern form, may be taken as writing that purposefully and self‐consciously provides an account of the author's life and incorporates feeling and introspection as well as empirical detail. In this sense, autobiographies are infrequent in English much before 1800. Although there are examples of autobiography in a quasi‐modern sense ...
Understanding Autobiography (Critical and Theoretical Works)
Autobiography is one of the most popular of written forms. From Casanova to Benjamin Franklin to the Kardashians, individuals throughout history have recorded their own lives and experiences. ... accounts of what it means to be a self in the world.In this Very Short Introduction Laura Marcus defines what we mean by "autobiography", and ...
What Is an Autobiography? Definition & 50+ Examples
An autobiography is a type of non-fiction writing that provides a firsthand account of a person's life. The author recounts their own experiences, thoughts, emotions, and insights, often focusing on how these events have shaped their life. Typically structured around a chronological narrative, an autobiography provides a window into the ...
autobiography
autobiography. The life story of an individual, as written by himself, is called autobiography. It differs from biography in that the person presents himself to his readers as he views himself and as he wants to be understood by others (see Biography ). The autobiographer's most useful source of information is his own memory, aided by diaries ...
The Genre of Autobiography: Definition and Characteristics
decisiveimages | Canva. Basics of Autobiography. Derived from three Greek words meaning "self," "life," and "write," autobiography is a style of writing that has been around nearly as long as history has been recorded. Yet autobiography was not classified as a genre within itself until the late eighteenth century; Robert Southey ...
autobiography, n. meanings, etymology and more
What does the noun autobiography mean? There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun autobiography. See 'Meaning & use' for definition, usage, and quotation evidence. See meaning & use. How common is the noun autobiography? About 6 occurrences per million words in modern written English . 1790: 0.064: 1800: 0.054: 1810: 0.069: 1820: 0.24 ...
Writing My Autobiography by Joseph Epstein
Autobiography is a complex enterprise, calling for its author not only to know himself but to be honest in conveying that knowledge. ... By this I mean that in my fiction and where necessary in my essays I do not shy away from the subject of sex, only from the need to describe it in any of its lurid details. So I have done in my autobiography ...
John Barth, novelist who orchestrated literary fantasies, dies at 93
John Barth, a novelist who crafted labyrinthine, fantastical tales that were at once bawdy and philosophical, placing him on the cutting edge of the postmodern literary movement, died April 2.

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