Autobiography

An autobiography (from the Greek, αὐτός-autos self + βίος-bios life + γράφειν-graphein to write) is a written account of the life of a person written by that person. In other words, it is a self-written life story.

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English periodical The Monthly Review, when he suggested the word as a hybrid, but condemned it as "pedantic". However, its next recorded use was in its present sense, by Robert Southey in 1809. Nonetheless, autobiography as a form goes back to Antiquity. Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints, whereas autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. Closely associated with autobiography (and sometimes hard to distinguish from it) is the memoir form.

See also: List of autobiographies and Category:Autobiographies for examples.

In antiquity such works were typically entitled , purporting to be self-justification rather than self-documentation. John Henry Newman's autobiography (first published in 1864) is entitled Apologia Pro Vita Sua in reference to this tradition.

The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus introduces his autobiography (Josephi Vita, c. 99) with self-praise, which is followed by a justification of his actions as a Jewish rebel commander of Galilee.

The pagan rhetor Libanius (c. 314–394) framed his life memoir (Oration I begun in 374) as one of his orations, not of a public kind, but of a literary kind that could not be aloud in privacy.

Augustine (354–430) applied the title Confessions to his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same title in the 18th century, initiating the chain of confessional and sometimes racy and highly self-critical, autobiographies of the Romantic era and beyond.

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