autobiography

     

An autobiography, from the Greek autos, 'self', bios, 'life' an graphein, 'write', is a biography written by the subject or composed conjointly with a collaborative writer (styled "as told to" or "with"). The term was first used by the poet Robert Southey in 1809 in the English periodical Quarterly Review, but the form goes back to antiquity. Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography however may be based entirely on the writer's memory. Closely associated with autobiography (and sometimes difficult to precisely distinguish from it) is the form of memoir.

Trivia about autobiography

  • Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" is described as this, as it's partially based on incidents in her own life
  • Margery Kempe's "Book Of Margery Kempe" is one of the first examples of this genre in English