:''For writing autobiographies on Wikipedia, see [[WP:Autobiography]]''
:''For music albums named ''Autobiography'', see [[Autobiography (album)]]''
[[Image:Memoirs of Franklin.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Cover of the first English edition of 1793 of [[Benjamin Franklin]]'s autobiography.]]
An '''autobiography''', from the [[Greek language|Greek]] ''autos'', 'self', ''bios'', 'life' and ''graphein'', 'write', is a [[biography]] written by the subject 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 is much older.

Nobody Cares
Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. A name for such a work in Antiquity was an ''[[Wiktionary:apology|apologia]],'' essentially more self-justification than introspection. [[John Henry Newman]]'s autobiography is his ''[[Apologia Pro Vita Sua|Apologia pro vita sua]].'' [[Augustine of Hippo|Augustine]] applied the title ''[[Confessions (St. Augustine)|Confessions]]'' to his autobiographical work, and [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]] took up the same title.

See [[List of autobiographies]] and [[:Category:Autobiography]] for examples.

===Autobiography and memoir===
A [[memoir]] is slightly different from an autobiography. Traditionally, an autobiography focuses on the "life and times" of the character, while a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on his or her own memories, feelings and emotions. Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. In the eighteenth century, "scandalous memoirs" were written (mostly anonymously) by prostitutes or libertines: these were widely read in France for their juicy gossip. But memoir has another meaning too. The pagan rhetor [[Libanius]] framed his life memoir as one of his [[oration]]s, not the public kind, but the literary kind that would be read aloud in the privacy of one's study. This kind of memoir refers to the idea in [[ancient Greece]] and [[ancient Rome]], that memoirs were like "memos," pieces of unfinished and unpublished writing which a writer might use as a memory aid to make a more finished document later on.

===Celebrity autobiography===
Until the last 21 years or so, few people without some gebuine claim to fame tried to write and publish a memoir. But with the critical and commercial success in the United States of such memoirs ''[[Angela's Ashes]]'' and ''[[The Color of Water]]'' more and more people have been encouraged to try their hand at this genre.

[[Paul Delaney]] has coined the term "ad hoc autobiography" to describe an autobiography motivated by the desire to exploit some temporary notoriety. Such autobiographies, often written by a [[ghostwriter]], are routinely published on the lives of professional athletes and media celebrities—and to a lesser extent about politicians. Some celebrities admit to not having read their "autobiographies."

==='Fictional autobiography'===
The term 'fictional autobiography' has been coined to define novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own biography. These novels generally do not follow a strict autobiographical guideline as they are still fictional. Carol Shield's novel, "[[The Stone Diaries]]" is an example of a fictional autobiography. The term may also apply to works of fiction purporting to be autobiographies of real characters, e.g. [[Stephen Marlowe]]'s ''The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes'', (1996).

==References==
*Barros, Carolyn A. "Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation". Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1998.
*Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. "The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse Since 1800". Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
*Lejeune, Philippe, ''On autobiography'', Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
*Mostern, Kenneth: "Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America", New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
*Nericcio, William A. "Autobiographies at La Frontera: The Quest for Mexican-American Narrative." ''The Americas Review'' 16.3-4 (1988): 165-87.
*Olney, James: "Memory & Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing". Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
*Pascal, Roy. "Design and Truth in Autobiography". Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.
*Stover, Johnnie M., ''Rhetoric and resistance in black women's autobiography'', Gainesville, Fla. [u.a.] : Univ. Press of Florida, 2003
<references/>

== See also ==
* [[:Category:Autobiographies]]
* [[Alphabiography]]
* [[Autobiographical songs]]
* [[Autobiographical novel]]
* [[Autobiographical comics]]
* [[Biography]]
* [[Family history]]
* [[Historical document]]
* [[List of autobiographies]]
* [[Memoir]]

[[Category:Autobiographies| ]]
[[Category:Biography]]

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