Biography

Introduction

Sigmund Freud greatly influenced the writing and study of biographies.

Biographies are in many ways history. The people who are considered important subjects and how their lives are documented often reflect the bent of the cultures that produce them. The nineteenth century in America saw the rise of the celebrity system. Periodicals grew in number, many of them featuring flattering (and sanitized/fictionalized) biographies of stage actors and other celebrities. Following the turn of the twentieth century, biographies were forever changed by Sigmund Freud and the advent of psychoanalysis. No longer simply records of the events of a person’s life, biographies were now designed to get inside their subjects’ heads. The increasing proliferation of celebrity culture in the late twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries led to two less reputable subgenres: the unauthorized biography and the “tell-all,” both of which use questionable sources and/or the testimony of disgruntled family members, former friends, and jilted paramours.

Essential Facts

Medieval biographies mostly chronicled the lives of saints and martyrs. This discipline developed into its own genre called hagiography.
Though extremely common in the twenty-first century, the first dictionary of biography appeared in the mid-sixteenth century.
In the Romantic period, the focus of biographies shifted from saints to poets. Throughout, historical figures remained a staple of the genre.
Technology has rendered biographical data even more accessible as many documents and articles can be accessed through online sites and databases.
One long-running TV series, Biography, chronicles the lives of notable people in history and popular culture. The series has been so prolific that it generated a spin-off network, The Biography Channel.