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The History of the Biographical Genre

Biographies have been found to have been written as far back as 5BC and beyond, originally with the intention of praising the person being written about - as in the 'Life of Evagoras' that was written by Isocrates. This early format gave way to church-orientated biographies, featuring notable people within the Church, later superseded biographies about the British royal family in antiquity - stories of Royal kings and queens who lived during the Middle Ages. This period in history also led to a variant of the traditional biography - that of the fictional biography such as that written by Sir Thomas Malory: 'Le Morte d'Arthur' about the life of the fictional King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Biographies began to evolve as the centuries Celebrity Profile wore on and, from the 18th century onwards, biography and autobiography became synonymous with the lives of people in the public eye. Samuel Johnson had a lot to do with enabling the biography genre to evolve, including narratives and anecdotes rather than just acting as a chronicler of a person's life. Meanwhile, a certain division appeared between the English representation and that of its American counterpart, the latter propounded by Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle asserted that biography was an essential and necessary part of history and should be treated as such, eventually emerging with an identity all its own. Nowadays biographies covered people's lives in many other fields such as science, mathematics and technology; theatre and performance art and sports' personnel.