An autobiography, sometimes called an autobio, is a book someone writes about their own life. It tells a personal story that includes the author's experiences, memories, and thoughts. This type of writing lets people share their unique views and life events, helping readers learn about the author's journey and the time or culture they lived in.
The word "autobiography" was first used in 1797, but writing about one's life began much earlier. One of the earliest examples is Saint Augustine's Confessions, written around 400 AD. This book is considered one of the first Western autobiographies. Unlike biographies, which are written by others, autobiographies are based on the author's memories and how they understand events. Because they come from the author's perspective, they may not always be completely accurate.
Autobiographies can be written in different ways. Memoirs focus on specific parts of a person's life, such as certain events or themes, rather than telling their whole story. Spiritual autobiographies, like Confessions, describe a person's religious experiences and spiritual growth. Fictional autobiographies are novels written in the first person, where a fictional character's life is presented as if it were a real autobiography.
Definition
The word "autobiography" was first used in a negative way by William Taylor in 1797 in an English magazine called The Monthly Review. He called the word a mix of other words and said it was "pedantic." Later, in 1809, Robert Southey used the word in its current meaning. Even though the term "autobiography" was not used until the early 1800s, writing about one's own life in the first person has been around since ancient times. Roy Pascal explains that autobiography is different from journal or diary writing. He says that autobiography looks back on a life from a specific moment, while a diary covers many different moments over time. Autobiography is written from the point of view of the person writing it at the time they are writing. Biographers usually use many different sources and opinions, but autobiographies may rely only on the writer's own memories. Memoirs are similar to autobiographies, but they often focus more on other people than on the writer themselves, according to Pascal. Autobiographies are naturally personal. Sometimes, the writer may not remember events correctly, which can lead to mistakes or false information. Some experts have observed that autobiographies allow the writer to describe events in a way that may not be completely accurate.
Related forms
A spiritual autobiography is a story written by an author about their journey toward God, including their struggles, religious conversion, and sometimes times when they faced challenges in their faith. The author often explains how their life shows God's plan through their experiences with the Divine. The earliest known spiritual autobiography is Augustine's Confessions. Over time, this tradition has grown to include works from other religions, such as Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography, Black Elk's Black Elk Speaks, and Deliverance from Error by Al-Ghazali. These works often support the religion of the author.
A memoir is different from an autobiography. While an autobiography covers the full life and experiences of a person, a memoir focuses on specific, personal memories, feelings, and emotions. Memoirs are often written by politicians or military leaders to share details about their important public events. One early example is Commentarii de Bello Gallico (or Commentaries on the Gallic Wars) by Julius Caesar, which describes battles from his nine years fighting in the Gallic Wars. His second memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Civil War), details events from the civil war between 49 and 48 BC.
Leonor López de Córdoba (1362–1420) is believed to have written the first autobiography in Spanish. The English Civil War (1642–1651) led to many examples of this genre, including works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. French examples from the same time include the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz (1614–1679) and the Duc de Saint-Simon.
A "fictional autobiography" is a novel that tells the life story of a fictional character as if the character wrote it themselves. In these stories, the character is the narrator and shares both their inner thoughts and outer experiences. Early examples include Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. A modern example is The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Another example is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, as noted on the original book's cover. This term can also apply to fictional works that pretend to be real autobiographies of historical figures, such as Memoirs of Lord Byron by Robert Nye.
History
In ancient times, such works were often called apologia, meaning they aimed to explain their actions rather than just tell their life story. The title of John Henry Newman's 1864 Christian book Apologia Pro Vita Sua reflects this tradition.
The historian Flavius Josephus began his autobiography Josephi Vita (written around 99 A.D.) with praise for himself, followed by an explanation of his actions as a Jewish rebel leader in Galilee.
The rhetor Libanius (314–394) wrote his life story, Oration I (begun in 374), as one of his speeches, not a public speech but a literary work meant to be read privately.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) used the title Confessions for his autobiography, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau later used the same title in the 18th century. This started a tradition of confessional and self-critical autobiographies during the Romantic era and beyond. Augustine’s Confessions is considered the first Western autobiography ever written and became a model for Christian writers during the Middle Ages. It describes Augustine’s youthful life focused on pleasure, his time with young men who boasted about their sexual experiences, his rejection of the anti-sex and anti-marriage beliefs of the Manichaeism religion, and his return to Christianity after embracing Skepticism and the New Academy movement (which taught that sex is good, but virginity is better, comparing the two to silver and gold). Augustine’s views greatly influenced Western theology. Confessions is regarded as one of the greatest works of Western literature.
Peter Abelard’s 12th-century Historia Calamitatum shares the spirit of Augustine’s Confessions and is a notable autobiography of its time.
In the 15th century, Leonor López de Córdoba, a Spanish noblewoman, wrote Memorias, which may be the first autobiography in Castilian.
Zāhir ud-Dīn Mohammad Bābur, founder of the Mughal dynasty in South Asia, wrote a journal called Bāburnāma (1493–1529), written in Chagatai/Persian.
One of the first great autobiographies of the Renaissance was written by Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), a sculptor and goldsmith. He titled his work simply Vita (Italian for "Life"). He wrote, "Everyone who has great achievements should write their own life story if they value truth and goodness, but they should wait until they are over forty." These ideas about autobiography remained common for many years, and most serious autobiographies from the next three centuries followed them.
Another autobiography from this period was De vita propria by Gerolamo Cardano (1574), an Italian mathematician, physician, and astrologer.
One of the first autobiographies written in an Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, written by Banarasidas, a Shrimal Jain businessman and poet from Mughal India. The work, written in Braj Bhasa (an early dialect of Hindi), describes his journey from a wild youth to a religious awakening. It also includes many details about life during the Mughal era.
The earliest known autobiography written in English is The Book of Margery Kempe (1438). It follows the tradition of telling a life story as a Christian witness, describing Margery Kempe’s pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Rome, her efforts to have a celibate marriage, and her spiritual experiences as a Christian mystic. Parts of the book were published in the early 1600s, but the full text was first published in 1936.
Possibly the first publicly available autobiography in English was Captain John Smith’s work published in 1630. Many people thought it was just a collection of exaggerated stories. This changed in 1964 when Philip Barbour’s biography proved that many of Smith’s stories were based on real events, suggesting Smith was present at the events he described.
Other notable English autobiographies from the 17th century include those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (published in 1764) and John Bunyan (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 1666).
Jarena Lee (1783–1864) was the first African American woman to have a published biography in the United States.
During the Romantic era, which focused on the individual and emotions, a more personal form of autobiography became popular, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. Stendhal’s The Life of Henry Brulard and Memoirs of an Egotist (1830s) were influenced by Rousseau. An English example is William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris (1823), which examines the writer’s love life.
As education and printing became more common, fame and celebrity grew, and many public figures began writing autobiographies. This included writers like Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, politicians like Henry Brooks Adams, philosophers like John Stuart Mill, church leaders like Cardinal Newman, and entertainers like P. T. Barnum. These works often included details about childhood and upbringing, moving away from the earlier style of "Cellinian" autobiography.
From the 17th century onward, "scandalous memoirs" by supposed libertines were published to satisfy public interest in scandal. These works were often fictional, written by ghostwriters, and used pseudonyms. Today, many autobiographies of athletes, celebrities, and even politicians are written by ghostwriters. Some celebrities, like Naomi Campbell, admit they did not read their own "autobiographies." Some works, like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, were later exposed as containing false or exaggerated details.
Autobiography has become a popular and widely accessible form of writing. A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey (1979) is an Australian literary classic. The success of memoirs like Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water in the United States encouraged more people to write about their lives. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (a recent autobiography) blends personal stories with critical theory, which she calls autotheory.
A genre where real-life events mix with fictional elements, while still claiming to be autobiographical, is called autofiction.