Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
For thousands of years we have recorded real lives—the lives of others, and of ourselves. For what purpose and for whom has this universal and timeless pursuit endured? What obstacles have lain in the path of biographers in the past, and what continues to confound biographers today? Above all, how is it that biographies and autobiographies play such a contested, popular role in contemporary Western culture, from biopics to blogs, from memoir to docudrama?
Award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton addresses these questions in an incisive and vivid narrative that will appeal to students of human nature and self-representation across the arts and sciences. Tracing the remarkable and often ignored historical evolution of biography from the ancient world to the present, this brief and fascinating tour of the genre conveys the passionate quest to capture the lives of individuals and the many difficulties it has entailed through the centuries. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to American Splendor, from cuneiform to the Internet, from commemoration to deconstruction, from fiction to fact—by way of famous biographical artists such as Plutarch, Saint Augustine, Sir Walter Raleigh, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, Sigmund Freud, Lytton Strachey, Abel Gance, Virginia Woolf, Leni Riefenstahl, Orson Welles, Julian Barnes, Ted Hughes, Frank McCourt, and many others—Nigel Hamilton's Biography: A Brief History will change the way you think about biography and real lives.
Synopsis
For thousands of years we have recorded real lives—the lives of others, and of ourselves. For what purpose and for whom has this universal and timeless pursuit endured? What obstacles have lain in the path of biographers in the past, and what continues to confound biographers today? Above all, how is it that biographies and autobiographies play such a contested, popular role in contemporary Western culture, from biopics to blogs, from memoir to docudrama?
Award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton addresses these questions in an incisive and vivid narrative that will appeal to students of human nature and self-representation across the arts and sciences. Tracing the remarkable and often ignored historical evolution of biography from the ancient world to the present, this brief and fascinating tour of the genre conveys the passionate quest to capture the lives of individuals and the many difficulties it has entailed through the centuries. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to American Splendor, from cuneiform to the Internet, from commemoration to deconstruction, from fiction to fact—by way of famous biographical artists such as Plutarch, Saint Augustine, Sir Walter Raleigh, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, Sigmund Freud, Lytton Strachey, Abel Gance, Virginia Woolf, Leni Riefenstahl, Orson Welles, Julian Barnes, Ted Hughes, Frank McCourt, and many others—Nigel Hamilton's Biography: A Brief History will change the way you think about biography and real lives.
Publishers Weekly
This zesty romp through millennia of biographical portraits comes from the pen of a master biographer (JFK: Reckless Youth). Hamilton's a friendly spectator to his own art, undaunted by its age, variety or the number and skill of the practitioners who've gone before him. Starting with the ancient Gilgamesh epic, he speeds us through the forms-writing, theater, painting and film-in which biographers have portrayed and interpreted individual lives. No shrinking violet, he wrestles with every major figure who's tried a hand at biography or criticized biographers' work. While his own strong convictions are clear, he's fair in his assessment of others and the ideal referee. Not surprisingly, Hamilton uses the most ink on recent decades, when the protections to privacy have fallen away and every dimension of a subject's life has become fair game. That doesn't much bother him, although it deeply troubles others. He also leans to the risky view that our age has brought biographical art to its maturity. Perhaps it has. But even if time proves Hamilton wrong, no one will fail to find his brief, interpretive history of life stories compelling. It's hard to think of a better introduction to one of the most popular genres of literature and art today. B&w illus. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Editorials
The Times
[Hamilton's] witty, readable account embraces the scholarly and the salacious, integrating them into a seamlessly coherent account, beginning with tales recorded in cuneiform on clay tablets in Ancient Sumer, and culminating in today's film and television 'biopics.'
— Lisa Jardine
Australian Book Review
The breadth of Hamilton’s approach is evident also in one of the most attractive features of the book: its inclusion of short extracts from pivotal biographical works. There are passages here from some of the authors one would expect, such as Benvenuto Cellini and James Baldwin. But here, too, there are surprises, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh an extract from a diary of the aide-de-camp of General Patton, describing his arrival at a concentration camp and several lines from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. This book offers not just a history of biography, but also a powerful defence of it.
— Barbara Caine
Bloomsbury Review
[A] continually fascinating history...Hamilton‘s learned, passionate approach is sufficient to grant biography all the respect it needs...His book is a celebration of the quite respectable status of the genre.
— William T. Hamilton
Booklist
Hamilton, biographer of JFK and Bill Clinton, is a knowledgeable and personable guide to a craft that is thousands of years old. His expansive definition of biography encompasses cave paintings, oil paintings, television documentaries, and Internet content in addition to books, a perspective that leads to numerous surprises while supporting his contention that biography should be granted the status of a scholarly discipline...[A] fascinating history.
— Steve Weinberg
Boston Globe
As artful as it is provocative, [Hamilton's] book is itself a revealing exercise in life writing.
— Amanda Heller
Choice
Supported and explicated by lively studies like this one, biography may finally get the respect it deserves.
— C. Rollyson
Financial Times
Entertaining history...There is much to glean from this brisk examination of our love affair with individuality.
— Craig Taylor
Library Review
Throughout Hamilton is a safe pair of hands, choosing excellent examples on the whole to make excellent points about the form, an inspired advocate of biography and clearly right on top of his brief...Hamilton is a superb guide...It is a book likely to appeal to many different readers—from experts on life-writing and literature and history to the general reader.
— Stuart Hannabuss
New York Times Book Review
[Hamilton] has produced a rich and provocative meditation on the history of biography.
— Scott Stossel
The Age
From the stick figures of cave paintings to contemporary comic strips, Nigel Hamilton traces the history of biography, briskly and with insight...Brief but admirably readable and thoughtful.
— Brenda Niall
The Independent
In this intelligent exploration of his own literary field (he is the biographer of Field-Marshall Montgomery and Bill Clinton), Nigel Hamilton demonstrates that the modern understanding of biography as a worthy, reasonably well-secured, if sometimes contentious 'life' has never been absolute...[A] fascinating and timely account.
— Elizabeth Speller
Times Higher Education Supplement
In this precise, massively informative and scrupulously researched new book, Hamilton turns his gaze from the lives of others to that of his own art, life-writing itself...[A] lovingly crafted life of life-writing from its birth on the cave walls of prehistoric man through to the postmodern electro-mayhem of blogging...Hamilton has written a book that is insistently readable.
— Tony Howe
Times Literary Supplement
[An] inviting book. In uncomplicated language, Hamilton uses well-chosen examples to whisk the reader through biographical expression in the ancient world, medieval hagiography and the development of life-writing from the subversive texts of the Renaissance to the whitewashed "pseudobiographies" of the nineteenth century...This engaging book indisputably demonstrates the intricate history of his field, and will prompt its readers to read "life-writing" both with more understanding and with greater pleasure.
— Lucy Carlyle
Washington Times
Who would imagine Nigel Hamilton's compact, erudite book about the history and practice of biography—called Biography: A Brief History—could be so wide-ranging and provocative? From prehistoric cave drawings (the animals are fully drawn while the hunters are stick figures) to today's films (the author himself won an award for a documentary based on his biography of Field Marshal Montgomery), Mr. Hamilton moves briskly through the centuries, highlighting how the depiction and recording of individual lives has changed from early oral sagas and cuneiform writing to Internet blogs. In essence, the author provides a short course on past societies viewed through their individuals, plus insights into the nature of individuality at certain periods in human history...Mr. Hamilton, a distinguished and prolific writer who has taught biography on both sides of the Atlantic, has distilled enormous wisdom into his remarkable little book. Read it and enjoy.
— John M. and Priscilla S. Taylor
Weekend Australian
This interesting overview would make a suitable text for a course called “Biography 101: the History of the Genre”...[ Biography: A Brief History] is a history of biographical writing from the cave drawings of Palaeolithic men and women to American Splendor, the remarkable film about comic strip novelist Harvey Pekar...All the important biographers and biographies are investigated including Shakespeare’s use of Holinshed’s Chronicles, the relationship between Boswell and Johnson and the writings of the great Lytton Strachey.
Publishers Weekly
This zesty romp through millennia of biographical portraits comes from the pen of a master biographer (JFK: Reckless Youth). Hamilton's a friendly spectator to his own art, undaunted by its age, variety or the number and skill of the practitioners who've gone before him. Starting with the ancient Gilgamesh epic, he speeds us through the forms-writing, theater, painting and film-in which biographers have portrayed and interpreted individual lives. No shrinking violet, he wrestles with every major figure who's tried a hand at biography or criticized biographers' work. While his own strong convictions are clear, he's fair in his assessment of others and the ideal referee. Not surprisingly, Hamilton uses the most ink on recent decades, when the protections to privacy have fallen away and every dimension of a subject's life has become fair game. That doesn't much bother him, although it deeply troubles others. He also leans to the risky view that our age has brought biographical art to its maturity. Perhaps it has. But even if time proves Hamilton wrong, no one will fail to find his brief, interpretive history of life stories compelling. It's hard to think of a better introduction to one of the most popular genres of literature and art today. B&w illus. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
This compact and informative book offers an insightful overview of the history of biography. Typically, biography is thought of as being written, but in today's world, biography would include broadcasting: radio, film, and even the Internet. Hamilton (fellow, McCormack Graduate Sch. of Policy Studies, Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston; JFK: Restless Youth) provides wide-ranging examples of biography in many forms, e.g., graphic arts, documentaries, and blogging. He investigates the chronicles of Suetonius and Tactius; the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and their depictions of Jesus; and Shakespeare's historical plays of kings and queens. He also draws scholarly conclusions from works by such writers as James Boswell and from Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, with its mockery of four famous personages. In time, public and private reputations were challenged in biography, hypocrisy exposed, character and motives analyzed, and sexuality in all of its manifestations revealed. Biographers continued with inquiry and research, biopics came into being, and the multiplicity of biographical outlets was everywhere. Hamilton has given readers a thought-provoking look at biography in its various forms; a fascinating and handy reference book for anyone wishing to know more about the history and art of biography.
—Robert Kelly Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information