Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.
Leon Edel
Biographers don’t get enough credit for the work they do; that’s why there’s Biographer’s Day! This holiday commemorates the history of biographers as a classical literature art form and helps people explore writing biographies as a way to discover other people’s lives.
Want to know more about what you can do to celebrate National Biographer’s Day? Read more to learn about the history of biography writing and how you can celebrate this exciting and engaging holiday.
How to Celebrate Biographer’s Day
Dig Deep Into Biographers
If you want to learn more about biographers, research about some of the most famous biographers in history, such as the Greek biographer Plutarch or the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle. Other famous biographers include Norman Mailer who wrote about Marilyn Monroe and Lee Harvey Oswald; and David McCullough, who has written several biographies including those based on the lives of Harry Truman, John Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt.
Grab Some Modern-day Reading Material
For some interesting modern-day autobiographical reads, check out Tina Fey’s humorous memoir, Bossypants, or a more serious autobiography like Michelle Obama’s Becoming. And for some very strange memoirs, check out Augusten Burroughs books, based mostly on his peculiar childhood.
Memoirs differ slightly from autobiographies in that they chronicle a specific time or aspect of the writer’s life, while an autobiography is more all-encompassing, with details about the entire writer’s life to date.
Get Your Biography Written
For those desperate to have a biography written about them, but unwilling to write an autobiography themselves, there are professional ghost-writer biographers who are willing to write them for quite the pretty penny. An average 200-page ghostwritten biography will run anywhere from $15,000 to approximately $30,000 depending on the range of detail needed, and the amount of research involved. A biographer might charge as much as $45,000 for a 300-page biography!
If you find biographies interesting, find a portrait of a person you admire and take the day to read about them.
Learn Benefits of a Well-detailed Biography
A significant benefit of a biography is that they’re written from a 3rd-person perspective, showing how the person’s life has interacted with and affected aspects they may not have considered. While slightly macabre, it also shows the historical influences the person had after they may have passed away.
A well-written biography can make history come alive. For people who struggle to remember certain facts and figures about history, a biography can really help cement the ideas.
When approached, most biographers will not directly state they are first-and-foremost biographers, but rather storytellers. A fantastically written biography should build an entire story, one in which a reader is on the edge of his or her seat to know the next details.
While facts should remain, well, factual, in a biography, the use of language can heighten the story of a life and have readers eager to turn each page. After all, each person’s life is full of details; it’s how the biographer spins them that can make them so enticing. The first goal of a biographer is to tell the truth of a person’s life, and the second: to make it a fascinating read.
When using the word “biography,” the first idea that may come to mind is a book, but a fantastic media for biography is documentary-style movies and shows, as well as the modern-day podcast. It’s a way for a biographer to use different media to convey a specific person’s life differently than just in the written word.
National Biographers Day Timeline
Cornelius Nepos Publishes “De Viris Illustribus”
The Roman writer Cornelius Nepos composed one of the earliest surviving collections of Latin biographies, presenting the lives of notable Greek and Roman commanders and statesmen in short, morally instructive sketches that help shape later biographical practice.
Plutarch Writes “Parallel Lives”
Greek author Plutarch creates paired biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, using their lives to explore character, morality, and the forces of history, and providing a powerful narrative model that influences biographers for centuries.
Suetonius Composes “The Twelve Caesars”
Roman scholar Suetonius writes detailed biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven emperors, mixing anecdote, scandal, and official records and helping establish biography as a key tool for understanding political power.
Einhard Writes “The Life of Charlemagne”
Frankish scholar Einhard authors a Latin prose life of Charlemagne that imitates classical models like Suetonius, becoming a seminal medieval royal biography and a bridge between ancient and medieval biographical traditions.
Boswell Publishes “The Life of Samuel Johnson”
Scottish writer James Boswell releases his monumental biography of Samuel Johnson, combining extensive interviews, diaries, and letters with vivid scene-setting, which helps establish modern biography in English as a rich, literary art form.
Lytton Strachey Releases “Eminent Victorians”
English critic Lytton Strachey publishes a set of unconventional biographies that use irony, selective detail, and psychological insight to puncture the reputations of Victorian idols, transforming expectations of how modern biographies can interpret their subjects.
Publication of the “Dictionary of National Biography” Complete Second Supplement
The appearance of the second supplement to Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography marks the consolidation of large-scale, scholarly collective biography projects, which provide rigorously sourced life histories and become foundational reference tools for historians and biographers.
History of National Biographer’s Day
Biographer’s Day takes place on the anniversary of the meeting of Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell, which took place on May 16, 1763. However, biographies have existed much longer than their meeting!
Originally, biographies were written historically, with one of the first biographies written during the time of the Roman Empire. The first found record of this kind of journal was written by Cornelius Nepos in 44 BC, who wrote an extensive biography on the most famous generals of the Roman and Greeks.
During the Middle Ages, priests, monks, and hermits would write memoirs, mostly because much of the writing back then was written for the Roman Catholic Church. The same also went for the medieval Islamic cultures as well. However, even as more and more biographies were written during the 1500’s, it wasn’t considered to be a form of literature.
That’s where the story of Samuel Johnson came into play. When he and James Boswell published The Life of Samuel Johnson in 1791, Boswell’s research and narrative style on Johnson’s life helped set the standard for biographers, as during that time it was considered to be one of the best biographies in the English language. Even if biographies stagnated during the 19th century, autobiographies became more popular, and in today’s media-centered world, memoirs have become an innovative and quick way for people to research who people are on the Internet.
Today, many political figures and celebrities become tightly-knit with their biographers. Biographers are journalists who get all the nitty-gritty details of a person’s life, then decide how to disclose the information and which details to hide behind closed curtains. Because of this, a friendship between biographer and biographee can play an immense role in how the story of a life is portrayed while maintaining truthfulness about it.
How Biography Has Evolved from Moral Lessons to Personal Stories
Biography has changed significantly over time, shifting from carefully crafted moral portraits of powerful figures to more intimate, detailed, and sometimes even controversial accounts of real lives.
These facts highlight how the purpose and style of biographical writing have developed, reflecting changing ideas about truth, storytelling, and historical record.
Biographical Writing Began as Moral Portraits of Statesmen and Rulers
In the ancient world, many of the earliest surviving biographies were written less to record a life “as it really was” and more to offer moral examples through the stories of powerful men. Cornelius Nepos’s “Lives of Eminent Commanders,” Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives,” and Suetonius’s “The Twelve Caesars” all select and shape episodes to illustrate virtue, vice, or leadership rather than provide neutral chronologies, a tradition that influenced how later Western biographers balanced storytelling with documentation.
Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ Helped Shift Biography Toward Intimate Detail
James Boswell’s “The Life of Samuel Johnson” (1791) is often called the first modern biography because of its unprecedented use of intimate conversation, daily minutiae, and firsthand observation.
Drawing on years of journals and notes, Boswell created a vivid, dialog-heavy portrait that departed from the stiff, exemplary “lives” of earlier centuries and set expectations that biographies could show inner character through scenes and speech.
Victorian Biographies Were Often Sanitized by Families
In the nineteenth century, biography became a popular form in Britain and the United States, but many lives of public figures were heavily controlled by surviving relatives and literary executors.
These “family” biographies sometimes destroyed letters, removed references to scandal or sexuality, and shaped the subject into a model of respectability, a practice that later critics argued distorted the historical record while illustrating how powerfully biography can be shaped by those who control the archives.
Professional Biographers Regularly Face Legal and Ethical Pressures
Modern biographers must navigate defamation law, privacy concerns, and the ethics of writing about living or recently deceased subjects.
Even in countries with strong protections for free expression, publishers often insist on extensive fact-checking and legal review, while biographers debate how far they can go in revealing private behavior, medical information, or family secrets without harming vulnerable people or sensationalizing their subjects’ lives.
“Authorized” and “Unauthorized” Biographies Often Use Similar Research Methods
An authorized biography usually means the subject or estate has granted cooperation, access to private papers, or interviews, but it does not guarantee accuracy or flattery.
Unauthorized biographers often rely more heavily on public records, court documents, and independent interviews, and some major prizewinning biographies have been written without cooperation from the subject, highlighting that critical distance can sometimes produce a more probing portrait.
Oral History Has Become a Key Tool in Contemporary Biography
Since the mid-twentieth century, recording technology and oral history techniques have reshaped how biographers work, allowing them to capture long, in-depth interviews with subjects and witnesses.
Institutions like the Columbia Center for Oral History and the British Library Sound Archive have built vast collections that biographers mine for firsthand accounts, adding texture and multiple perspectives that written documents alone rarely provide.
Collective Biography Has Long Been Used to Highlight Overlooked Groups
Alongside single-subject lives, writers have produced “collective biographies” that document groups often missing from official history, such as women, workers, or colonized peoples. Nineteenth-century works like “Lives of Girls Who Became Famous” and twentieth-century series on Black leaders, scientists, or activists helped widen the biographical canon, and modern scholars now use life-writing to recover stories of people who left few traditional records.
