I.

Introduction

Biography, the written account of an individual life. (An autobiography is a biography written by the subject.) The term biography connotes an artful, conscious literary genre that employs a wide range of sources, strategies, and insights; that deals with the intimate, inconsistent textures of personality and experience; and that attempts to render the whole sense of its subject, not the life only but what it was like to have lived it at its several stages. Ideally, the writer molds complex biographical facts—birth and death, education, ambition, conflict, milieu, work, relationship, accident—into a book that has the independent vitality of any creative work but is, at the same time, “true to life.”