What Is an Autobiography? Definition, Features and Examples

An autobiography is an account of a person's life written by that person. It is nonfiction, it is told in the first person, and it usually covers the whole life, or most of it, from family background and childhood up to the time of writing. In short: the author and the subject are the same person.

What does autobiography mean?

The word is built from three Greek parts: autos ("self"), bios ("life") and graphein ("to write"). Put together, it means "self-life-writing."

The word is younger than the thing it names. People wrote about their own lives for well over a thousand years before English had a single word for it. The earliest recorded use in English is from 1797, when the writer William Taylor suggested it in The Monthly Review, and he did so a little grudgingly, calling the hybrid word pedantic. The next recorded use in today's sense came from the poet Robert Southey in 1809. Before that, writers spoke of their "life," their "memoirs" or their "confessions."

Key features of an autobiography

• The author is the subject. This is the defining feature. A book about someone else is a biography, however personal it feels.
• First-person point of view. The narrator says "I" and speaks from inside the life.
• A whole-life scope. Most autobiographies move through birth, family, education, work, relationships and later years.
• Mostly chronological order. Events usually follow the calendar, though many writers open with a striking moment and then go back to the beginning.
• Looking back from a fixed point. An autobiography reviews a life from one particular moment. What the writer knows at the time of writing shapes how earlier events are told.
• A claim of truth. Readers expect real people and real events. Memory is imperfect, and every autobiography is subjective, but it is not invented.

Types of autobiography

Type	What it is	Example
Standard autobiography	A self-written account of a whole life	Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, written 1771 to 1790
Collaborative or "as told to"	The subject tells the story; a professional writer shapes it	The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), with Alex Haley
Spiritual autobiography	The story of an inner journey of faith, often ending in conversion	John Bunyan, Grace Abounding (1666)
Autobiographical novel	Fiction drawn from the author's life, with names and events changed	Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

Ghostwritten and "as told to" autobiographies

Many people with a story to tell are not professional writers, so they work with one. In a collaborative autobiography, the subject supplies the memories, usually through long interviews, and a writer turns them into a book. Sometimes the collaborator is credited on the cover; sometimes the help stays hidden, which is what "ghostwriting" means.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a well-known case. The journalist Alex Haley conducted more than 50 in-depth interviews with Malcolm X from 1963 until his assassination in February 1965, and the book was arranged as an "as told to" account. It was published later in 1965, with an epilogue by Haley. Scholars now tend to see Haley less as a ghost and more as an essential collaborator who deliberately kept his own voice quiet.

Spiritual autobiography

A spiritual autobiography tells the story of a person's inner life, especially their struggle toward faith. The pattern is old and recognizable: a restless or wayward youth, growing unease, then a turning point. The form was especially common in Protestant writing of the seventeenth century, and Bunyan's Grace Abounding is perhaps the most famous English example.

Autobiographical novel vs autobiography

This is the distinction students most often mix up. An autobiography asks to be read as fact. An autobiographical novel is fiction: it borrows from the author's life but changes names and places and may alter or exaggerate events for the sake of the story. James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) follows a young man very like Joyce, but it is a novel. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963) is often described as semi-autobiographical. If a book is labeled a novel, treat it as one, however close it sits to the author's life.

Early classic examples

• Augustine, Confessions (written about 397 to 400). Thirteen books in Latin that trace his youth and his conversion to Christianity, then turn to philosophical reflection. It is often called the first Western autobiography, though it stops long before the end of his life.
• The Book of Margery Kempe (1438). Usually described as the earliest known autobiography written in English.
• Benvenuto Cellini's Life (begun 1558). The Italian goldsmith and sculptor's lively, boastful account of his own career, first printed in 1728.
• Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (written 1771 to 1790). Written in four parts, the first addressed to his son William, and left unfinished at his death. It first appeared in French in Paris in 1791; English editions followed in 1793.
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). The first of three autobiographies by the abolitionist and orator; the others are My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau borrowed Augustine's title for his own Confessions in the 18th century, and the confessional, self-critical style has run through the form ever since. For more modern titles across politics, science, sport and the arts, see our list of autobiography examples.

Autobiography, memoir and biography

An autobiography tells a whole life. A memoir, also written by the person who lived it, tells one part of that life, such as a childhood, an illness or a single job, and pays more attention to feeling and meaning than to the full record. Our guide to memoir vs autobiography sets the two side by side. A biography is different again: it is written by someone else, in the third person, from research. The guide to biography vs autobiography explains how the two are made.