Biography: A Brief History

Nigel Hamilton

ISBN 10: 0674034716 / ISBN 13: 9780674034716

Published by Harvard University Press, 2010

About this Item

2010. Paperback. 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? This title answers these questions. Num Pages: 360 pages, 20 halftones. BIC Classification: BGH; DSB. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 178 x 140 x 48. Weight in Grams: 354. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780674034716

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Biography: A Brief History
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674034716
• ISBN 13: 9780674034716
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

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.

About the Author

Nigel Hamilton is the author of prize-winning biographies of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and of John F. Kennedy. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.