Autobiography.html



Cover of the first English edition of 1793 of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography

An autobiography, from the Greek αὐτός autos "self", βίος bios "life" and γράφειν graphein "to write", is a biography written by the predicate 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.