Literary notes about Biography (AI summary)
The term "biography" has been employed in literature not merely as a straightforward account of a life but often as a multifaceted tool for exploring history, personality, and cultural identity. In some instances, biography serves as a succinct yet layered narrative instrument to encapsulate a subject’s complexities—as seen in Thackeray’s subtle dismissal of details in a character’s account ([1]) or Mark Twain’s self-effacing admission that writing one can lead to social ostracism ([2]). At other times, writers invoke biography as a means of framing history itself, as Thomas Carlyle famously asserts that the history of the world is the biography of great men ([3], [4]), linking individual lives to grand historical narratives. Moreover, it is used to comment on the nature of storytelling and remembrance, with phrases suggesting that even every minor detail of one's existence might be read as a biography ([5]) and that recorded lives are, at times, fragmentary or disputed ([6], [7]). Thus, across various literary works—from condensed chronicles ([8], [9]) to reflective essays ([10])—biography emerges as both a literal and metaphorical canvas on which the interplay of fact, interpretation, and myth is vividly rendered.
- We are bound, you see, to give some account of Becky's biography, but of this part, the less, perhaps, that is said the better.
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray - I wrote the biography, and have never been in a respectable house since.
— from What Is Man? and Other Essays by Mark Twain - The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men.
— from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle - The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.
— from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle - Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched.
— from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James - I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man.
— from Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Herman Melville - As is usually the case in Indian biography much uncertainty exists in regard to his parentage and early life.
— from Myths of the Cherokee by James Mooney - The biography was condensed from Alex Bein's Theodor Herzl, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America.
— from The Jewish State by Theodor Herzl - The time of the dictation of his Book and of the execution of his Last Will have been almost the only undisputed epochs in his biography.
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Marco Polo and da Pisa Rusticiano - Is not every leaf of it a biography, every fibre there an act or word?
— from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle