A Brief History of Biographies

Does the success of warts-and-all celebrity biographies betray our prurient, voyeuristic times? Or is a fascination with the lives and struggles of others a facet of human nature, reflected in literary tastes through the ages? Modern biographies, Andrew Brown argues, inspire by framing life as a struggle - against drink, drugs, depression or deprivation - that is eventually won. Yet this trajectory can be found in even the earliest lives of saints, struggling against the devil. A Brief History of Biographies considers the ways in which developments such as changing attitudes to subjectivity and the self, the cult of the artist and psychoanalysis have brought this most fascinating of forms from its early religious connotations to its present state.