Biography vs Autobiography: Key Differences Explained

The difference comes down to who holds the pen. A biography is the story of a person's life written by someone else, usually in the third person and based on research. An autobiography is the story of a life written by the person who lived it, in the first person and based largely on memory. Everything else, from tone to trustworthiness, follows from that.

At a glance

	Biography	Autobiography
Who writes it	Another person: a historian, journalist or writer	The subject, sometimes with a collaborator
Point of view	Third person ("she," "he," "they")	First person ("I")
Main sources	Documents, letters, archives, interviews	The author's own memory, diaries and papers
Subject can be	Living or dead, recent or ancient	Only living at the time of writing
Strength	Distance, cross-checking, a wider view	Inner experience nobody else can supply
Blind spot	Cannot fully know private thoughts	Self-interest, gaps and kind or unkind memory

Who writes it, and from where

A biographer stands outside the life. That position has costs: the biographer was not there for most of it and cannot see inside the subject's head. It also has advantages. A biographer can compare several accounts of the same event, read letters the subject forgot writing, and see patterns the subject was too close to notice.

An autobiographer stands inside the life. Only the author knows what a moment felt like, why a choice was made or what was left unsaid. The trade-off is that the author is also the most interested party. Nobody is neutral about their own story, and memory tends to tidy, flatter or punish.

Some books blur the line. An autobiography may be written with a collaborator or ghostwriter, but it is still told in the subject's voice and presented as the subject's own account. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), written with the journalist Alex Haley from long interviews, is the classic example.

Point of view and voice

Biographies are written in the third person. The voice belongs to the biographer, who can describe the subject from outside, weigh other people's opinions and judge.

Autobiographies are written in the first person. The voice is the subject's own, with their humor, their vocabulary and their silences. That is a large part of why readers seek them out: the voice is itself evidence of the person.

Sources and research

How a biographer works

Biographical research gathers material from many directions: letters, diaries, official records, oral histories and interviews with people who knew the subject. The best biographers treat every source, including the subject, with care.

Robert Caro's The Power Broker (1974), a life of Robert Moses, the unelected official who planned and built many of New York's roads and bridges, is a famous example of research on a grand scale. Caro conducted hundreds of interviews over seven years. Moses himself sat for seven interviews, then ended them when Caro began asking about discrepancies between Moses's account and other people's. The book won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, a category that, tellingly, puts the two forms side by side.

Firsthand acquaintance can matter too. James Boswell first met Samuel Johnson in 1763, kept detailed journals of their conversations, and built The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) partly from those notes, aiming to show Johnson's life in scenes. It is often counted among the great biographies in English.

How an autobiographer works

Memory is the main source, but careful autobiographers check it. They reread their own letters and diaries, look at dated photographs and official records, and ask relatives what they remember. Helen Keller began writing The Story of My Life while still a student at Radcliffe College; it first ran in installments in Ladies' Home Journal in 1902 and came out as a book in 1903. Its picture of her early years, especially her time with her teacher Anne Sullivan, could have come only from Keller herself.

Authorized vs unauthorized biographies

An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation and sometimes the participation of the subject or the subject's heirs. That usually means access: interviews, private papers and introductions to family and friends.

Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs (2011) is a well-known authorized biography. It drew on more than 40 interviews with Jobs over two years and on interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, colleagues and rivals. Jobs asked for no control over the content beyond the cover and gave up the right to read the book before publication.

An unauthorized biography is written without the subject's permission or input. The term is mostly used for books written during the subject's lifetime or soon after their death, not for histories of people long gone. Such books may be more independent, but their authors miss information and corrections known only to the subject and those closest to them.

Authorized does not automatically mean flattering, and unauthorized does not automatically mean hostile. Readers should look at the author's sources, notes and reputation rather than the label alone.

Examples of each

Biographies

• Plutarch, Parallel Lives (around AD 80): paired lives of famous Greeks and Romans.
• Suetonius, his lives of the Caesars (around AD 121).
• James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).
• Robert Caro, The Power Broker (1974).
• Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (2011).

Autobiographies

• Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (1903).
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), with Alex Haley.
• Many more, from Augustine to modern athletes, appear in our list of autobiography examples.

Which should you read, or write?

Read an autobiography when you want the person's own voice and inner view. Read a good biography when you want the fullest, most tested account. For a well-known figure, reading one of each is the best way to see both the life and the person.

If you are planning to write, the choice is simple: about yourself, an autobiography or a memoir; about a parent or grandparent, a biography, even a short family one built from interviews and records. If you are unsure whether your own story is a whole life or one chapter, see memoir vs autobiography.