An autobiography (from the Greek, αὐτός-autos self + βίος-bios life + γράφειν-graphein to write) is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.
The word autobiography was first used by the poet Robert Southey in 1809 in the English periodical, the 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 writ...
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An autobiography (from the Greek, αὐτός-autos self + βίος-bios life + γράφειν-graphein to write) is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.
The word autobiography was first used by the poet Robert Southey in 1809 in the English periodical, the 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.
See List of autobiographies and Category:Autobiographies for examples. Also see main article Memoir.
In antiquity such works were typically entitled apologia, implying as an example of much self-justification as self-documentation. John Henry Newman's autobiography (first published in 1864) is entitled Apologia Pro Vita Sua in reference to this tradition.
The pagan rhetor Libanius (c. 314–394) framed his life...
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