The story of an individual’s life in its objective reactions and its subjective realizations is called a biography. It records the actions and recreates the personality of an individual.
Biography is different from History as it deals with individuals. Unlike fiction, it tells us about facts.
According to Samuel Johnson, biography in a true sense is “which tells not how any man became great, but how he was made happy; not how he lost the favors of his Prince, but how he became discontented with himself”.
“The Intuitive Biography” has the basic idea that a personality is essentially simple. Once a key to the character is found, all actions fall into a pattern. This type of biography was introduced by Saint Beuve, who meditated upon the man and his production till his portrait lived and spoke. Then he said, “I have found the man”.
According to “The Debunking Biography”, pedestals are for statues not for men. This type of biography was introduced by Lytton Strachey who was an iconoclast. He had contempt for hero-worship. He wanted to show the skeleton in the cupboard. So, he broke or destroyed old idols with the weapon of wit, irony, and even cynicism.
Before Strachey, the greatest of the modern biographers, the Biographers used to idealize their heroes by representing them as “Angels of Virtue”. They would neglect the dark side of their heroes’ character. Thus, their heroes never came out fully alive in their biographies.
Strachey, for the first time, realized that in order to give complete and human portraiture, a Biographer should not only dwell upon the “great things of great men” but also on the “small things of great men”. Thus, he did not hesitate to include the weaknesses, foibles, failings, jokes, and caprices of his heroes in his biographies.
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