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What’s the difference between a Memoir vs. Autobiography vs. Biography?

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Memoir, biography, autobiography, oh my! All these book genres have a focus on someone’s life and are written in completely factual ways. The adage that truth is stranger than fiction rings true when we delve into the lives of significant people or people who have endured something significant.

Table of Contents: • What is a biography? • What is an autobiography? • What is a memoir? • Differences between a memoir vs. autobiography vs. biography • Key features of a memoir • Key features of an autobiography • Key features of biography • BookBaby can help you self-publish

It’s easy to confuse the style and tone of these three different nonfiction books. Each has different requirements to qualify as a memoir vs. biography vs. autobiography.

What is a biography?

A biography is a novel written about someone’s entire life, typically in chronological order, written by someone other than the subject.

The topic of a biography will often be someone who is an important historical figure, a celebrity, or a person who has had significant cultural or societal impact.

One excellent example of a biography is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. This biography describes how a black woman’s body was used to advance modern medicine. Henrietta Lacks’ cancer cells were taken — without her knowledge — for medical testing and has served as the blueprint for cancer treatment.

This real-life tale reveals a hidden narrative in modern medicine and points to a history of racism in the field. The story was written and recounted by Rebecca Skloot, an American writer who has contributed to many scientific publications.

What is an autobiography?

While a biography is a written account of someone else’s life, an autobiography is written by the person who is the subject of the book.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley details the life of civil rights activist Malcolm X. Written by Malcolm, this autobiography features a collaboration with author and journalist Alex Haley and was released nine months after Malcolm X’s assassination.

Reading an autobiography can be more powerful and intriguing than a biography, partly because the words and perspectives are unique to the subject. There are details and insights that only the person who is the subject can convey — unfiltered by the lens of someone else. As they recount the important events of their lives from start to finish, we get to experience it in their own words.

What is a memoir?

While a biography or autobiography usually focuses on impactful historical figures or someone who had significant cultural impact, it’s not only famous people who can write about their lives. While some lesser-known figures will be the subjects of those books, memoirs allow someone who has led a less “public” life to write about their experiences and the lessons they’ve learned.

A memoir covers a specific period of the subject’s life, often detailing a unique personal experience and how the subject was transformed by it. Unlike autobiographies and biography, a memoir does not present someone’s life from the beginning to the present (or the end). It gives us a unique look into a specific period that was transformational to the person writing it.

More than the other real-life accounts, memoir proves over and over how ordinary people can have great impact and insight writing about the trials they overcome.

Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, is a compelling example of a memoir vs. autobiography. This is a story about a young woman who, after losing her mother to cancer and getting divorced (among other travails), embarks on a 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest trail — alone.

Having no previous professional hiking experience, her expedition mirrors the inner trials and tribulations she overcame before surviving in the wild on this extraordinary hike.

Men We Reaped: A Memoir, by Jesmyn Ward, is another notable memoir. The story focuses on the death of five black men in Ward’s life between the years 2000–2004. Ward details the lives of these young black men who die early in her life and speaks to how young black men’s lives are cut short far too often. She traces the impact of these losses through her own family history and writes of the complexities of love and grief.

Differences between a memoir vs. autobiography vs. biography

Key features of a memoir.

As a rule, a memoir is pulled from the writer’s real-life experience. When a person picks up a memoir, they are expecting a story that truly happened to the author. That said, a memoir isn’t just recalling events and re-told to the reader. A satisfying memoir touches on universal themes about the life story uncovered by the events that happened to the writer.

Of course, memoirs aren’t here to preach a specific message or serve as a “how-to” guide to overcoming a particular experience — in the best memoirs, the author shows their emotional truth as opposed to the truth.

Memoirs do not have to be recounted in chronological order, and there is room for creative freedom. You can’t make up important events, but there is some wiggle room around specific details in dialogue and other specifics.

Notably, a memoir also doesn’t recount the author’s whole life, but details a pivotal part of it that holds significance based on the author’s transformation. It is the author’s recollection of memories and their perspective on it.

Key features of an autobiography

An autobiography is a life account written by the subject themself. An autobiography is a recounting of the writer’s entire life from childhood up until the age they are at the time of the writing, accurately detailing significant accomplishments and telling the story of the making of who the writer is and the events that shaped their life. All of the contents of an autobiography must be 100 percent true.

Key features of biography

A biography is an account of a person’s life story written by someone other than the subject. It is the author’s rendition of what the author knows about the person’s life, sometimes personally and certainly by collecting and researching information about their life. It is typically focused on someone of cultural or historical significance.

BookBaby can help you self-publish

Whether you’re embarking on an autobiography, a biography, or a memoir, drawing universal truths from the lives of real people is a rewarding task. Of course, as a writer, once you have completed the first draft of your manuscript, it’s important to have an editor work on your manuscript to ensure it reads clearly to your reader.

BookBaby offers three types of book editing services that will be good to use at different stages of your editing process.

Line editing is our most popular editing service for first-time authors. Our line editors will review your manuscript and check for style, structure, word choice and syntax. You will also receive feedback regarding pacing, advice for writing flow, and an audit on tone and style.

Copy editing might be the best option for nonfiction authors writing a biography, autobiography, or memoir. Copy editing is a “word-by-word” edit, focusing on spelling and punctuation, along with an intensive grammar audit.

Proofreading is the last and final stage. It includes a basic check for grammar, spelling, and any lingering typos before publishing.

When your manuscript is proofed and ready, BookBaby offers print-on-demand services and distribution of your book, so you can get your work in the hands of readers. Call one of our publishing specialists to get started at 1-877-961-6878 or visit us at www.bookbaby.com .

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Definition of Biography

Common examples of biographical subjects, famous examples of biographical works, difference between biography, autobiography, and memoir, examples of biography in literature, example 1: savage beauty: the life of edna st. vincent millay (nancy milford).

One of the first things Vincent explained to Norma was that there was a certain freedom of language in the Village that mustn’t shock her. It wasn’t vulgar. ‘So we sat darning socks on Waverly Place and practiced the use of profanity as we stitched. Needle in, . Needle out, piss. Needle in, . Needle out, c. Until we were easy with the words.’

Example 2: The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (Claire Tomalin)

The season of domestic goodwill and festivity must have posed a problem to all good Victorian family men with more than one family to take care of, particularly when there were two lots of children to receive the demonstrations of paternal love.

Example 3: Virginia Woolf (Hermione Lee)

‘A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living’: so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don’t stay still, so life-writing can’t be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going ‘ahead of the rest of us, like the miner’s canary, testing the atmosphere , detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions’. So, ‘There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation’. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story.

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Table Of Contents

What is a novel?

A novel is an invented prose narrative of significant length and complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience. Its roots can be traced back thousands of years, though its origins in English are traditionally placed in the 18th century.

What are the elements of a novel?

A novel can accommodate an almost infinite number of elements. Some of the novel's typical elements, though, are the story or plot, the characters, the setting, the narrative method and point of view, and the scope or dimension.

What are the different types of novels?

The novel has an extensive range of types, among them being: historical, picaresque, sentimental, Gothic, psychological, novel of manners, epistolary, pastoral, roman à clef, antinovel, cult, detective, mystery, thriller, western, fantasy, and proletarian. There is no limit to the number of genres available to the novel.

novel , an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting . Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque , epistolary , Gothic , romantic , realist, historical —to name only some of the more important ones.

Explore essential elements of the novel with Clifton Fadiman and actors

The novel is a genre of fiction , and fiction may be defined as the art or craft of contriving, through the written word, representations of human life that instruct or divert or both. The various forms that fiction may take are best seen less as a number of separate categories than as a continuum or, more accurately, a cline, with some such brief form as the anecdote at one end of the scale and the longest conceivable novel at the other. When any piece of fiction is long enough to constitute a whole book, as opposed to a mere part of a book, then it may be said to have achieved novelhood. But this state admits of its own quantitative categories, so that a relatively brief novel may be termed a novella (or, if the insubstantiality of the content matches its brevity , a novelette), and a very long novel may overflow the banks of a single volume and become a roman-fleuve , or river novel. Length is very much one of the dimensions of the genre.

The term novel is a truncation of the Italian word novella (from the plural of Latin novellus , a late variant of novus , meaning “new”), so that what is now, in most languages, a diminutive denotes historically the parent form. The novella was a kind of enlarged anecdote like those to be found in the 14th-century Italian classic Boccaccio’s Decameron , each of which exemplifies the etymology well enough. The stories are little new things, novelties, freshly minted diversions, toys; they are not reworkings of known fables or myths , and they are lacking in weight and moral earnestness. It is to be noted that, despite the high example of novelists of the most profound seriousness, such as Tolstoy , Henry James , and Virginia Woolf , the term novel still, in some quarters, carries overtones of lightness and frivolity. And it is possible to descry a tendency to triviality in the form itself. The ode or symphony seems to possess an inner mechanism that protects it from aesthetic or moral corruption, but the novel can descend to shameful commercial depths of sentimentality or pornography . It is the purpose of this section to consider the novel not solely in terms of great art but also as an all-purpose medium catering for all the strata of literacy.

Such early ancient Roman fiction as Petronius ’ Satyricon of the 1st century ad and Lucius Apuleius’ Golden Ass of the 2nd century contain many of the popular elements that distinguish the novel from its nobler born relative the epic poem. In the fictional works, the medium is prose, the events described are unheroic , the settings are streets and taverns, not battlefields and palaces. There is more low fornication than princely combat; the gods do not move the action; the dialogue is homely rather than aristocratic. It was, in fact, out of the need to find—in the period of Roman decline—a literary form that was anti-epic in both substance and language that the first prose fiction of Europe seems to have been conceived. The most memorable character in Petronius is a nouveau riche vulgarian; the hero of Lucius Apuleius is turned into a donkey; nothing less epic can well be imagined.

Young woman with glasses reading a book, student

The medieval chivalric romance (from a popular Latin word, probably Romanice , meaning written in the vernacular , not in traditional Latin) restored a kind of epic view of man—though now as heroic Christian, not heroic pagan. At the same time, it bequeathed its name to the later genre of continental literature , the novel, which is known in French as roman , in Italian as romanzo , etc. (The English term romance, however, carries a pejorative connotation.) But that later genre achieved its first great flowering in Spain at the beginning of the 17th century in an antichivalric comic masterpiece—the Don Quixote of Cervantes, which, on a larger scale than the Satyricon or The Golden Ass , contains many of the elements that have been expected from prose fiction ever since. Novels have heroes, but not in any classical or medieval sense. As for the novelist, he must, in the words of the contemporary British-American W.H. Auden ,

Become the whole of boredom, subject to Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just Be just, among the Filthy filthy too, And in his own weak person, if he can, Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.

The novel attempts to assume those burdens of life that have no place in the epic poem and to see man as unheroic, unredeemed, imperfect, even absurd. This is why there is room among its practitioners for writers of hardboiled detective thrillers such as the contemporary American Mickey Spillane or of sentimental melodramas such as the prolific 19th-century English novelist Mrs. Henry Wood , but not for one of the unremitting elevation of outlook of a John Milton .

The novel is propelled through its hundred or thousand pages by a device known as the story or plot. This is frequently conceived by the novelist in very simple terms, a mere nucleus, a jotting on an old envelope: for example, Charles Dickens ’ Christmas Carol (1843) might have been conceived as “a misanthrope is reformed through certain magical visitations on Christmas Eve,” or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) as “a young couple destined to be married have first to overcome the barriers of pride and prejudice,” or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) as “a young man commits a crime and is slowly pursued in the direction of his punishment.” The detailed working out of the nuclear idea requires much ingenuity, since the plot of one novel is expected to be somewhat different from that of another, and there are very few basic human situations for the novelist to draw upon. The dramatist may take his plot ready-made from fiction or biography—a form of theft sanctioned by Shakespeare—but the novelist has to produce what look like novelties.

The example of Shakespeare is a reminder that the ability to create an interesting plot, or even any plot at all, is not a prerequisite of the imaginative writer’s craft. At the lowest level of fiction, plot need be no more than a string of stock devices for arousing stock responses of concern and excitement in the reader. The reader’s interest may be captured at the outset by the promise of conflicts or mysteries or frustrations that will eventually be resolved, and he will gladly—so strong is his desire to be moved or entertained—suspend criticism of even the most trite modes of resolution. In the least sophisticated fiction, the knots to be untied are stringently physical, and the denouement often comes in a sort of triumphant violence. Serious fiction prefers its plots to be based on psychological situations, and its climaxes come in new states of awareness—chiefly self-knowledge—on the parts of the major characters.

Melodramatic plots, plots dependent on coincidence or improbability, are sometimes found in even the most elevated fiction; E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) is an example of a classic British novel with such a plot. But the novelist is always faced with the problem of whether it is more important to represent the formlessness of real life (in which there are no beginnings and no ends and very few simple motives for action) or to construct an artifact as well balanced and economical as a table or chair; since he is an artist, the claims of art, or artifice , frequently prevail.

There are, however, ways of constructing novels in which plot may play a desultory part or no part at all. The traditional picaresque novel —a novel with a rogue as its central character—like Alain Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715) or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), depends for movement on a succession of chance incidents. In the works of Virginia Woolf , the consciousness of the characters, bounded by some poetic or symbolic device, sometimes provides all the fictional material. Marcel Proust ’s great roman-fleuve , À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past ), has a metaphysical framework derived from the time theories of the philosopher Henri Bergson , and it moves toward a moment of truth that is intended to be literally a revelation of the nature of reality. Strictly, any scheme will do to hold a novel together—raw action, the hidden syllogism of the mystery story , prolonged solipsist contemplation—so long as the actualities or potentialities of human life are credibly expressed, with a consequent sense of illumination, or some lesser mode of artistic satisfaction, on the part of the reader.

What is a Biography? Definition, Elements, and More

Have you found yourself browsing the biography section of your favorite library or bookstore and wondered what is a biography book ?

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! Plenty of people wonder “What is a biography vs autobiography?” or “What is a biography vs memoir?” And today we are here to set the record straight.

In this brief guide to what a biography is, we’ll explore the definition of a biography, along with its purpose, how you might write one yourself, and more. Let’s get started.

Need A Nonfiction Book Outline?

In this article, we’ll explore:

What is a biography of a person .

What is a biography? A biography is what we call the written account of someone’s life. It is written by someone other than whom the book is about. For example, an author named Walter Isaacson has written biographies on Steve Jobs , Leonardo da Vinci , and Einstein .

A biography is what focuses on the significant events that occurred in a person’s life, along with their achievements, challenges they’ve overcome, background, relationships, and more.

They’re an excellent way to get a comprehensive understanding of someone you admire.

So now you understand what a biography is, but what is the point of a biographical story?

What is the point of a biography?

Biographies have a few purposes. They can serve as historical records about a notable figure, inspire and educate readers, and give us more insight into how the folks we’re interested in lived their lives.

And, if you are studying a notable figure, like Einstein, a biography is what you will use as a research resource !

Does a biography cover someone’s entire life?

Biographies typically encompass most of a person’s life. Obviously, if the subject of the book is still alive, their entire life cannot be written about.

If the person lived a long and eventful life with many achievements, the author may cover only an especially noteworthy period of the subject’s life.

Even so, the point of a biography is to learn about your subject beyond just what they achieved, so there will likely still be contextual information about the subject’s childhood, formative experiences, and more.

Is a biography always nonfiction?

Surprisingly, a biography is not always nonfiction . There is a genre called biographical fiction in which the author uses real-life people and events to inspire their fictional narrative .

This genre is fun because the author can postulate about what their subject may have been thinking, feeling, and more in a way they may not be able to with a nonfiction biography.

Just keep in mind that biographical fiction blends facts with made-up information, so it can’t be used as a primary research source. That said, it’s a fun supplement to learning about a figure you’re interested in, and can help generate curiosity and insights about their lives.

If you’d like to read a biographical fiction book, check out books like:

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin

Biography vs autobiography

What is a biography vs autobiography? Well, a biography is written about another person . An autobiography is when the writer writes about their own life. So Becoming by Michelle Obama would be an autobiography, not a biography. It’s only a biography if another author decides to write about Michelle Obama.

Biography vs memoir

What is a biography vs memoir? This distinction is a bit harder to define. A memoir is usually written around a theme or a specific time period in someone’s life, and the author is writing about their own memories. Whereas a biography is in chronological order and follows (more or less) the whole lifetime of a person, but it is a person other than the author.

So if someone is telling stories about their travels through South America, that isn’t covering their life story, and it is written about themself, so it would be a memoir instead of a biography.

Now that you know what a biography is, and the importance of biographies, let’s discuss why someone would want to write one.

Why would someone write a biography?

An author may want to write a biography about someone because they’re inspired by them and want to educate the public about them. Or, they want to create a historical resource for scholars to study.

An author may even have a commercial motivation for writing a biography, like a lucrative celebrity profile or a biography that has the potential to be adapted into a film or television series.

Is it possible to write a biography about yourself?

If you write a book about yourself, it’s called an autobiography or a memoir—not a biography. So, when you start writing your book, make sure you don’t get caught in the autobiography vs biography or biography vs memoir maze.

If you’d like a book written about you that you’re not the author of, you can hire a writer to create one for you. You may choose to do this if you feel your writing skills are not up to par or you don’t have time to write your own biography .

Hiring a writer to write your biography can also make sense if you’d like to make sure the book is as objective and professional as it can be. Of course, this means you have to surrender control of the narrative!

Some folks may also feel that a biography has more credence than an autobiography or memoir since the book’s subject doesn’t get to decide what is said about them. So hiring a writer for your biography can be a good way to credibly get your story out there.

Can you write a biography about anyone you’d like?

When it comes to writing about other people’s lives, it’s wise to proceed with an abundance of caution. After all, you don’t want to be sued for defamation or find yourself in other legal hot water.

We highly suggest you look into the legal ramifications of writing about your chosen subject before you begin writing about them, but here are a couple of general things to know:

Typically, you don’t need permission to write about someone who is a public figure. However, the definition of a public figure can vary depending on your jurisdiction and more, so you’ll need to do your research.
Even if you discover that you can write about your subject without permission, it’s still advisable to contact the subject and/or their family. Not only is it good manners, but it may afford you some insider information about your subject.
If your subject or the family of your subject tells you they don’t want a biography about them, you may still legally be able to proceed—consult a lawyer—but you might face backlash when the book is published, limited access to information about your subject, and perhaps a pressing sense of guilt. Not worth it, if you ask us!

Examples of biographies

What’s a biography that is really good? Here are a few of the best biographies you should add to your list:

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera
Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross
Anne Frank: The Biography by Melissa Müller
You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe
The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz
Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire by Julia Baird

We’ve also reviewed the best business biographies of highly successful entrepreneurs. These books offer invaluable lessons and inspiration for aspiring business leaders and authors.

Final thoughts

Now if anyone asks you “What’s a biography?” You should be able to tell them (and give them some great examples).

Reading a biography is a great way to get inspired, learn from other people’s experiences, and more. And writing a biography can be an excellent educational experience in its own right! If you’d like to publish a biography but don’t know where to start, we’re here to help. Simply schedule a book consultation to get started.

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How the Novel Made the Modern World

And how the modern world unmade the novel

Martin Amis once remarked , apropos of the idea of writing a book about America, that you might as well try to write one about people, or life. Or, he might have said, the English novel. Yet here we have the fruits of such an enterprise in all their cyclopedic, cyclopean glory: Michael Schmidt’s The Novel: A Biography —1,100 pages spanning nearly 30 dozen authors, starting with the pseudonymous Sir John Mandeville (he of the 14th-century Travels ) and ending 45 brisk, brilliant, intimate, assured, and almost unflaggingly interesting chapters later with Amis himself.

Such an effort represents the labor of a lifetime, one would think. In fact, it is a kind of sequel to Lives of the Poets (1998), a comparably commodious compendium. Schmidt—who was born in Mexico, went to school in part in the United States, and has made his career in Britain—is himself a poet and novelist as well as an editor, publisher, anthologist, translator, and teacher. Given the fluidity with which he ranges across the canon (as well as quite a bit beyond it), one is tempted to say that he carries English literature inside his head as if it were a single poem, except that there are sections in The Novel on the major Continental influences, too—the French, the Russians, Cervantes, Kafka—so it isn’t only English. If anyone’s up for the job, it would seem to be him.

Still, 1,100 pages (and rather big ones, at that). I wasn’t sure I had the patience for it. Then I read this, in the second paragraph. Schmidt is telling us about the figures he’s enlisted as our guides along the way, novelist-critics like Henry James, Virginia Woolf, V. S. Pritchett, Gore Vidal, and many others:

They are like members of an eccentric family in an ancestral mansion … Some are full of respect, some reserved, others bend double with laughter; the rebellious and impatient slash the canvases, twist the cutlery, raise a toast, and throw the crystal in the grate. Their damage is another chapter in the story.

It wasn’t the notion that Schmidt was going to orchestrate the volume as a dialogue with and among these practitioners, though that was promising. It wasn’t the metaphor of the eccentric family per se, though that was interesting. It was the writing itself. The language was alive; the book would be alive as well. Take a breath, clear the week, turn off the WiFi, and throw yourself in.

Schmidt’s account is chronological, but loosely so. Early chapters flash forward to the present or near-present, so that Aphra Behn shares quarters with Zora Neale Hurston, Daniel Defoe with Capote and Coetzee. Schmidt is weaving threads, picking out lines of descent: the Gothic, the exotic, the vernacular, the journalistic; manners, genres, voices, verisimilitude. Through Mandeville and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and The Pilgrim’s Progress , we see the novel (or rather, its precursors) find a sense of form, coalesce from a sequence of incidents into a coherent structure. Through Defoe and Richardson and Fielding, the 18th-century emergence, we see it becoming the novel.

A Biography : Schmidt’s subtitle is cunningly chosen. The novel begins as a bigheaded infant, takes its first uncertain steps, then slowly gathers its capacities. Once they’ve been invented, they’re available to all. “Earlier novelists address the reader directly,” Schmidt remarks in reference to Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy , “but not personally.” Later, in Austen, “something new and remarkable begins to happen”: by perfecting the technique of free indirect discourse, in which the minds of narrator and character merge, she creates protagonists who feel so real “that they can step outside the frame of their particular novel and companion us.” By the time of the Brontës in the middle of the 19th century (we’re a fourth of the way through the book), “the form had become versatile and capacious: Scott filled it with history, the Gothic writers with dream.” Chronology is change but also enrichment; fashions and phases will get our understanding only so far. Every novelist is free to reach back into history, pull out an old trick, and make it new.

In Aspects of the Novel , E. M. Forster famously requests us to imagine the English novelists not as floating down the stream of time, but “seated together in a room, a circular room,” all writing at once. In Schmidt, they get up and mingle. The book, at its heart, is a long conversation about craft. The terms of discourse aren’t the classroom shibboleths of plot, character, and theme, but language, form, and address. Here is where we feel the force of Schmidt’s experience as an editor and a publisher as well as a novelist. He knows how books get written, and not just in technical terms. He tells us that Fielding got £800 for Amelia , guides us through the office politics of literary London circa 1900, lets us in on who became a drunk, got divorced, had an outsider’s chip on his shoulder. The book is a biography in that sense, too: the lives of the novelists.

Schmidt understands that novels are written for readers—not “ideal” readers, not readers in the abstract, but actual people out there in the market—and he explains how books and buyers shape each other. Arnold Bennett, who made himself rich in the years before the First World War, played to the audience created by mass literacy. “He knew what the new reader wanted: authority, instruction, a way of feeling safe in the world of books, of not being wrong-footed by a natural liking or an exposed ignorance.” The literary novel—the modernist novel in the wake of Flaubert—arose against the same phenomenon. Its way, Schmidt suggests, had been prepared by Poe, who not only invented a genre, the detective story, “he invented, by extension, the reader of that genre,” who then “impacts upon the future writer with … techniques of suspicious reading, where every detail is interrogated and weighed.”

Around the insights of his artist-docents, of Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess and Joyce Carol Oates, Schmidt weaves his own dense tapestry of aperçus. “[Jack] London and Hemingway share a direct style, but London pulls the whole melting mess of the iceberg up on shore for us to see.” Poe’s ability to frighten a reader, “especially late at night,” has in part to do with “the spaces that vowels carve out of the darkness.” Like Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides and other young writers “practice a detachable moralizing and deliver civic asides.” There are pleasures such as this on almost every page. For Jewish writers after the Second World War, Central Europe “provides a living, alternative, polyglot modernism to the cultural hunger Pound and Eliot fed with a deliberated amalgam constructed out of safely dead cultures.” Salman Rushdie, unlike his Indian predecessors, “does not busk to British or American readers but addresses his subject directly, as if to create Indian and Pakistani readers.”

Note the breadth of Schmidt’s attention, the variety of angles from which he’s able to approach a book. He has his favorites (Fielding, Conrad, Naipaul, Amis), as well as those he thinks are overrated (Thomas Pynchon, Ian McEwan, Paul Auster), but he takes each one on his own terms, and in his own times. He doesn’t expect Dos Passos, with his political engagement and documentary style, to look like Nabokov, the avatar of aestheticism. He doesn’t ask the writers of the past (or the present) to affirm his social views. Some get a couple of paragraphs, a few get 10 pages or more, but each is seen as if intensely spotlit; they are their own story, as well as part of a greater one.

There’s a reason that we call them novels. The genre, Schmidt remarks, “takes in and takes on invention like no other literary form.” Modernity’s preeminent artistic innovation, the novel is perpetually striving to achieve the new. Its very looseness, its lack of rules and notorious difficulty of definition, is the secret of its strength. What is a novel? Almost anything that writers have attempted to convince us that it might be. Fiction has always been conspicuously porous to other forms, especially those that we refer to by the term that would seem to negate it, nonfiction : travel, history, journalism, biography, true crime—in our own day, most obviously, memoir. “Reality hunger,” to borrow the title of David Shields’s 2010 anti-novel manifesto, is hardly something new. The novel has always been a glutton for the real.

For one thing, it simply has more room than other forms (though serial television has emerged as a rival). Unconstrained by conditions of performance, it makes the most rotund Wagnerian opera, let alone the longest movie, play, or symphony, look anorexic by comparison. Schmidt remarks that the novel arose from medieval genres, with little relation to the classical tradition, but as it grew it claimed the epic goal of plenitude, the ambition to incorporate the whole of life. So many landmark novels are not only huge, they seem to seek to swallow the entire world: Don Quixote , Moby-Dick , Middlemarch , Ulysses , War and Peace (whose title might be glossed as Iliad Plus Odyssey , an epic times two), Proust’s Recherche , the titanic sociographic cycles of Balzac and Zola, the whole Joycean line of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, who wrote a book whose title dares the adjective infinite .

The novel is novel, but it is also, typically, news—the tidings of the world around us. It is no coincidence that a number of the genre’s greatest exponents, starting with Defoe himself, were journalists as well. The novel reaches in and out at once. Like no other art, not poetry or music on the one hand, not photography or movies on the other, it joins the self to the world, puts the self in the world, does the deep dive of interiority and surveils the social scope. That polarity, that tension—call it Richardson versus Fielding, the novels of the soul and of the road—has proved endlessly generative. You can put yourself at any moment, as a writer, anywhere you want to on the spectrum, from the most introspective to the most documentary, invent whatever methods you can think of to bring both self and world into focus.

The self in society: the modern question. The novel is coeval with other phenomena that first appeared in full-fledged form in the 18th century—like privacy and sensibility and sentiment and boredom, all of which are closely linked to its development. Novel-reading is indeed unusually private, unusually personal, unusually intimate. It doesn’t happen out there, in front of our eyes; it happens in here, in our heads. The form’s relationship to time is also unique. The novel isn’t static, like painting and sculpture, but though it tells a story, it doesn’t unfold in an inexorable progression, like music, dance, theater, or film. The reader, not the clock, controls the pace. The novel allows you the freedom to pause: to savor a phrase, contemplate a meaning, daydream about an image, absorb the impact of a revelation—make the experience uniquely your own.

More than with any other form of art, the relationships we have with novels are apt to approach the kind we have with people. For a long time, novels were typically named after people ( Tom Jones , Emma , Jane Eyre ), but that is not the crux of it. What makes our experience of novels so personal is not that they have protagonists, but that they have narrators. Paintings and photographs don’t, and neither, with rare (and usually unfortunate) exception, do movies or plays. Novels bring another subjectivity before us; they give us the illusion of being addressed by a human being.

They are also exceptionally good at representing subjectivity, at making us feel what it’s like to inhabit a character’s mind. Film and television, for all their glories as narrative and visual media, have still not gotten very far in that respect, nor is it easy to see how they might. The camera proposes, by its nature, an objectivist aesthetic; its techniques are very crude for representing that which can’t be seen, the inner life. (“I hate cameras,” Schmidt quotes Steinbeck as having remarked. “They are so much more sure than I am about everything.”) You often hear that this or that new show is like a Dickens novel. There’s a reason that you never hear one likened to a novel by Virginia Woolf or Henry James.

Novels call us out. “In the intensity of our engagement,” Schmidt remarks, “we ourselves are judged.” The statement is made in connection with Richardson, but it applies to his progeny, too—the whole tradition, central to the English novel, of strenuous moral struggle. As the characters are tested, so are we. What you read becomes a mark of election, and even more, how . (“Books—oh! no,” says Elizabeth Bennet to Mr. Darcy. “I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings.”) The novel was a smithy, perhaps the smithy, in which the modern consciousness was forged.

The modern consciousness, but not the postmodern one. The novel’s days of cultural preeminence have long since gone. The form rose to primacy across the 19th century, achieved a zenith of prestige in modernism, then yielded pride of place to the new visual media. It is no accident, perhaps, that the modernist anni mirabiles after the First World War (the years of Ulysses , Proust, Mrs. Dalloway , The Magic Mountain , The Great Gatsby , and others) directly preceded the invention of the talkies—a last, astounding efflorescence.

This is not to say that great novels haven’t continued and won’t continue to be written. It is to start to understand why people have been mooting the “death of the novel” ever since that shift in cultural attention, as well as why the possibility is met, by some, as such a calamity. Privacy, solitude, the slow accumulation of the soul, the extended encounter with others—the modern self may be passing away, but for those who still have one, its loss is not a little thing. Schmidt reminds us what’s at stake, for novels and their intercourse with selves. The Novel isn’t just a marvelous account of what the form can do; it is also a record, in the figure who appears in its pages, of what it can do to us. The book is a biography in that sense, too. Its protagonist is Schmidt himself, a single reader singularly reading.

All of which brings us to another, only slightly less ambitious book, Lawrence Buell’s The Dream of the Great American Novel . Buell, a professor emeritus at Harvard, is a distinguished figure in the field of American literature. His book, the harvest of a long career, is both less and more than its title suggests. Buell begins by tracing the history of his titular subject: the birth, after the Civil War, of the notion of what Henry James would soon refer to as the GAN, that one grand fiction that encapsulates the national experience; the concept’s fall from critical favor in the middle decades of the 20th century; and its persistence, to this day, as a popular and journalistic aspiration, talking point, and parlor game.

But Buell seems less interested in the “dream,” the concept as a cultural phenomenon, than in constructing a taxonomy of GAN contenders—and thus, in large measure, of American fiction as a whole. This is where the ambition comes in, as well as Buell’s enormous erudition. He’s read everything, it seems, that bears upon the question: all the novels, all the criticism, all the history, all the literary theory. Buell identifies three principal GAN “scripts”: the “up from” story of the self-made individual ( An American Tragedy , The Great Gatsby , The Adventures of Augie March , Invisible Man , American Pastoral ); the “romance of the divide,” meaning primarily the racial divide ( Uncle Tom’s Cabin , Huckleberry Finn , Absalom, Absalom! , Gone With the Wind , Beloved ); and the “meganovel” of democratic community ( Moby-Dick , U.S.A. , Gravity’s Rainbow ). A fourth paradigm, which sits uneasily athwart the rest, is represented by a single book, The Scarlet Letter , a novel “made classic by retelling”—a GAN contender, in other words, by virtue of sheer iconicity.

Buell’s book tells us a great deal about American fiction. What it also tells us, in its every line, is much of what is wrong with academic criticism. We can start with the language, as we did with Schmidt. Here is a fair sample of Buell’s prose:

Admittedly any such dyadic comparison risks oversimplifying the menu of eligible strategies, but the risk is lessened when one bears in mind that to envisage novels as potential GANs is necessarily to conceive them as belonging to more extensive domains of narrative practice that draw on repertoires of tropes and recipes for encapsulating nationness of the kinds sketched briefly in the Introduction—such that you can’t fully grasp what’s at stake in any one possible GAN without imagining the individual work in multiple conversations with many others, and not just U.S. literature either.

That’s one sentence. There is an idea in there somewhere, but it can’t escape the prose—the Byzantine syntax and Latinate diction, the rhetorical falls and grammatical stumbles. Schmidt’s smooth sentences urge us ever onward. Buell’s, like boulders, say stop, go back.

The truth is that by academic standards, Buell’s writing isn’t especially bad—which makes him, as an instance, even worse. By the same token, he isn’t noxiously ideological in the current style, isn’t an “-ist” with an ax to grind or swing—all the more reason to deplore how thoroughly (it seems, reflexively) his book bespeaks the reigning ideologies. Buell, whose careful terror seems to be the possibility of saying something politically incorrect—the book does so much posturing, you think it’s going to throw its back out—appears to have absorbed every piety in the contemporary critical hymnal. You can see him fairly bowing to them in his introduction, as if by way of ritual preparation. There they are, propitiated one by one—Ethnicity, Globalism, Anti-Canonicity, Anti-Essentialism—like idols in the corners of a temple.

The frame of mind controls the readings. Novels aren’t stories, for Buell, works of invention with their own disparate purposes and idiosyncratic ends. They’re “interventions” into this or that political debate—usually, of course, concerning gender, race, or class, as if everyone in history had the same priorities as the English professors of 2014. Nearly every book is scored against today’s approved enlightened norms. Gone With the Wind loses points for “containing” Scarlett and embodying an “atavistic conception of human rights” but wins a few back for being “even more transnationally attuned than Absalom ,” exhibiting “maverick tendencies in some respects as pronounced as Faulkner’s,” and engaging in “an act of feminist exorcism that Absalom can’t imagine.” Go team!

In the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin —a book that makes this kind of reading sweat, being heroically progressive by the standards of its day but embarrassing by ours—pages are spent parsing its exact degree of virtue. Witnesses are called:

Here, as critic Lori Merish delicately puts it, Stowe “fails to imagine African Americans as full participant citizens in an American democracy.” George Harris’s grand design to Christianize Africa looks suspiciously imperialistic to boot, veering Stowe’s antislavery critique in the direction of what Amy Kaplan trenchantly calls “manifest domesticity.”

I feel as if we’re back in Salem. Maybe he should have just thrown the book in the water to see if it would float. Buell is a person, one should say, who uses terms like cracker , redneck , and white trash without self-consciousness or irony, which makes his moral teleology all the more repulsive—his assumption (and it’s hardly his alone) that all of history has been leading up to the exalted ethical state of the contemporary liberal class.

The one kind of standard that Buell will not permit himself is an aesthetic one. Like many academics now, he’d rather cut his tongue out than admit in public that he thinks a book is good or bad. He fidgets for a page before screwing up the courage to suggest that Stowe’s Dred , a sort of thematic sequel to Uncle Tom’s Cabin , “seems destined for less success as an act of fictional outreach.” A long paragraph ponders why The Marrow of Tradition , by the African American writer Charles Chesnutt, never achieved the popularity of Huckleberry Finn —before the next one tells us that even multiculti critics think it’s pretty lousy.

This is not about applying some timeless measure of artistic value. It is simply about owning up to his own preferences—to his own pleasures. Just as Buell’s prose gives the impression of having been produced by a machine, so does his book as a whole. He never tells us why you’d actually want to read these works. The omission points to an unresolved ambiguity: Is he talking about Great American Novels or just great American novels, and is there a difference? He can’t address the question, because he can’t acknowledge the existence of the second category. Never mind those “scripts,” which dwell upon the kinds of thematic considerations that get novels onto curricula now and turn them, as Schmidt puts it, into “ ‘text[s]’ to talk about and around.” What sorts of qualities have made people—people with no professional stake in the game—champion certain books but not others, and do so decade after decade? Buell likes to cite the various blogs and forums where ordinary readers debate their favorite “greats” (among other things, it gives him a chance to make populist noises), but he isn’t really interested in the experience of individual readers, including himself.

And that explains another omission—or rather, a large set of them. There are a lot of great American novels, and great American authors, that he hardly deals with at all. Many pages, in the aggregate, are spent on mediocre or forgotten works that fit his paradigms. Hemingway, meanwhile, believe it or not, is mentioned only incidentally. Henry James is represented, in a brief consideration, by a second-level work, The Bostonians . Lolita gets little more than a page, as does Blood Meridian . A whole related run of work is essentially absent: The Naked and the Dead , The Catcher in the Rye , On the Road , In Cold Blood , Catch-22 , Slaughterhouse-Five . If your first reaction to this list is that all of those are written by white men—if you think that literary criticism is best conducted as a demographic census—then you may just be part of the problem.

But that is not the real point. The real point is that a lot of readers, of whatever race or gender, have loved these books and thought them great. Instead of starting with his scripts and themes, Buell should have started here: with the passions that make people read—and write—in the first place. That is finally what’s at issue, when we speak about the state of academic criticism: how it responds, or does not, to the process of reading; how it shapes, or misshapes, the readers of tomorrow—who will in turn, as Schmidt knows, help shape the fiction of tomorrow.

The notion of the Great American Novel, Buell tells us, is largely without parallel in other countries. Essential to its constitution, it would seem, is precisely that dimension of “dream”: of tantalizing elusiveness, as if its fulfillment lay forever in the future, just like America’s itself. The quintessentially modern form, for the quintessentially modern country. The novel rose with modern selves because the novel, classically, relates the story of an individual attempting to create herself against existing definitions. That possibility is also under threat, as the bureaucrats of identity, within and without the academy, attempt to keep us in the grids to which they have assigned us. The question of the novel’s future is important, but equally important, as Schmidt and Buell so differently reveal, is the question of its past: of how we receive it, of how we will let ourselves use it to make us.

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Publication date: 05/12/2014

Like his hero Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature , Schmidt chooses as his traveling companions not critics or theorists but “artist practitioners,” men and women who feel “hot love” for the books they admire, and fulminate against those they dislike. It is their insights Schmidt cares about. Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English.

Schmidt believes there is something fundamentally subversive about art: he portrays the novel as a liberalizing force and a revolutionary stimulus. But whatever purpose the novel serves in a given era, a work endures not because of its subject, themes, political stance, or social aims but because of its language, its sheer invention, and its resistance to cliché—some irreducible quality that keeps readers coming back to its pages.

Given the fluidity with which [Schmidt] ranges across the canon (as well as quite a bit beyond it), one is tempted to say that he carries English literature inside his head as if it were a single poem, except that there are sections in The Novel on the major Continental influences, too—the French, the Russians, Cervantes, Kafka—so it isn’t only English. If anyone’s up for the job, it would seem to be him… Take a breath, clear the week, turn off the WiFi, and throw yourself in… The book, at its heart, is a long conversation about craft. The terms of discourse aren’t the classroom shibboleths of plot, character, and theme, but language, form, and address. Here is where we feel the force of Schmidt’s experience as an editor and a publisher as well as a novelist… Like no other art, not poetry or music on the one hand, not photography or movies on the other, [a novel] joins the self to the world, puts the self in the world, does the deep dive of interiority and surveils the social scope… [Novels] are also exceptionally good at representing subjectivity, at making us feel what it’s like to inhabit a character’s mind. Film and television, for all their glories as narrative and visual media, have still not gotten very far in that respect, nor is it easy to see how they might… Schmidt reminds us what’s at stake, for novels and their intercourse with selves. The Novel isn’t just a marvelous account of what the form can do; it is also a record, in the figure who appears in its pages, of what it can do to us. The book is a biography in that sense, too. Its protagonist is Schmidt himself, a single reader singularly reading. —William Deresiewicz, The Atlantic

[Schmidt] reads so intelligently and writes so pungently… Schmidt’s achievement: a herculean literary labor, carried off with swashbuckling style and critical aggression. —John Sutherland, New York Times Book Review

If you want your books a bit quieter and more extensive chronologically, then do try poet Michael Schmidt’s 700-year history of the novel, The Novel: A Biography , which covers the rise and relevance of the novel and its community of booklovers in a delightful tale, not at all twice-told, that reminds us of exactly why we read. —Brenda Wineapple, Wall Street Journal

A wonderful, opinionated and encyclopedic book that threatens to drive you to a lifetime of rereading books you thought you knew and discovering books you know you don’t. —Rowan Williams, New Statesman

The Novel: A Biography is a marvel of sustained attention, responsiveness, tolerance and intelligence… It is Schmidt’s triumph that one reads on and on without being bored or annoyed by his keen generosity. Any young person hot for literature would be wise to take this fat, though never obese, volume as an all-in-one course in how and what to read. Then, rather than spend three years picking up the opinions of current academics, the apprentice novelist can learn a foreign language or two, listen, look and then go on his or her travels, wheeling this book as vade mecum . —Frederic Raphael, Literary Review

In recent years, while the bookish among us were bracing ourselves for the bookless future, stowing our chapbooks and dog-eared novellas in secret underground bunkers, the poet and scholar Michael Schmidt was writing a profile of the novel. The feat itself is uplifting. Bulky without being dense or opaque, The Novel: A Biography belongs on the shelf near Ian Watt’s lucid The Rise of the Novel and Jane Smiley’s livelier user manual, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel . Taking as his guide The March of Literature , Ford Madox Ford’s classic tour through the pleasures of serious reading, Schmidt steers clear of the canon wars and their farcical reenactments. He doesn’t settle the question of whether Middlemarch makes us better people. He isn’t worried about ‘trigger warnings.’ And he doesn’t care that a Stanford professor is actively not reading books. Instead, with humor and keen insight, he gives us the story of the novel as told by practitioners of the form. The book is meant for ordinary readers, whose interest is not the death of theory or the rise of program fiction, but what Schmidt calls, in a memorable line, ‘our hunger for experience transformed.’ —Drew Calvert, Los Angeles Review of Books

The Novel is one of the most important works of both literary history and criticism to be published in the last decade… The reason Schmidt’s book is so effective and important has to do with its approach, its scope, and its artistry, which all come together to produce a book of such varied usefulness, such compact wisdom, that it’ll take a lot more than a few reviews to fully understand its brilliant contribution to literary study… Here, collected in one place, we have the largest repository of the greatest novelists’ opinions and views on other novelists. It would take the rest of us going through countless letters and essays and interviews with all these writers to achieve such a feat. Schmidt has done us all a great, great favor… Maybe the most complete history of the novel in English ever produced… [A] multitudinous achievement… Schmidt [is] an uncannily astute critic… Schmidt’s masterpiece… Schmidt’s writing is a triumph of critical acumen and aesthetic elegance… [ The Novel ] is a monumental achievement, in its historical importance and its stylistic beauty… It is, itself, a work of art, just as vital and remarkable as the many works it chronicles. —Jonathan Russell Clark, The Millions

Rare in contemporary literary criticism is the scholar who betrays a love for literature… How refreshing, then, to encounter in Michael Schmidt’s The Novel: A Biography not a theory of the novel, but a life. And what a life it is… Schmidt arranges his examination both chronologically and thematically, taking into account the influences and developments that have shaped the novel for hundreds of years. The Novel is at once encyclopedia, history, and ‘biography.’ …[Schmidt’s] lyrical prose weaves together literary analysis, biography, and cultural criticism… Another delightful aspect of The Novel consists of the surprising and insightful connections Schmidt finds among writers… The Novel is more revelatory (and interesting) than a merely chronological account would be. —Karen Swallow Prior, Books & Culture

[Schmidt] is a wonderful and penetrating critic, lucid and insightful about a dizzying range of novelists. —Nick Romeo, Daily Beast

Show[s] how much is to be gained by the application of unfettered intelligence to the study of literature… Schmidt seems to have read every novel ever published in English… This is as sensitive an appreciation of Fielding’s style (all those essayistic addresses to the reader that introduce each of the eighteen books of Tom Jones ) as any I’ve ever read. And what Schmidt does for Fielding he does equally well for Ford Madox Ford, Mary Shelley, and (by my count) about 347 others… [Schmidt’s] sensibilities are wholly to be trusted. —Stephen Akewy, Open Letters Monthly

I was left breathless at Michael Schmidt’s erudition and voracious appetite for reading. —Alexander Lucie-Smith, The Tablet

[Schmidt] has written what claims to be a ‘biography’ of the novel. It isn’t. It’s something much more peculiar and interesting… Illuminating and fascinating. And because the book makes no pretense to objectivity, the prose is engaging and witty… [A] marvelous book… If there is a future for encyclopedic books ‘after’ the internet, this is a model of how it should be done. —Robert Eaglestone, Times Higher Education

The title and the length of Michael Schmidt’s book promise something more than an annotated chronology. This is not a rise of, nor an aspects of, nor even a theory of, the novel, but a nuanced account of the development of an innovative form… Schmidt’s preferences are strong and warm. He admires a range of authors from Thomas Love Peacock and Walter Scott to Anthony Burgess and Peter Carey… The Novel: A Biography incidentally provides the material for one to make a personal re-reading list. —Lindsay Duguid, Times Literary Supplement

[Schmidt] prove[s] his wide-ranging reading tastes, his ability to weave a colorful literary tapestry and his conviction that the novel is irrepressible. —Kirkus Reviews

If focusing on the events surrounding one novel isn’t enough, or is too much, Michael Schmidt offers an eclectic variety in The Novel: A Biography . At 1,160 pages, this hefty volume features 350 novelists from Canada, Australia, Africa, Britain, Ireland, the United States, and the Caribbean and covers 700 years of storytelling. But Schmidt does something different: while the book is arranged chronologically, the chapters are theme-based (e.g., ‘The Human Comedy,’ ‘Teller and Tale,’ ‘Sex and Sensibility’) and follow no specific outline, blending author biographies, interviews, reviews, and criticism into fluid narratives… This is a compelling edition for writers and other readers alike; a portrayal that is aligned with Edwin Muir’s belief that the ‘only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.’ —Annalisa Pesek, Library Journal

I toast a certainty—the long and fruitful life of poet, critic, and scholar Michael Schmidt’s book, The Novel: A Biography . Readers for generations will listen through Schmidt’s ear to thrilling conversations, novelist to novelist, and walk guided by Schmidt through these 1200 pages of his joyful and wise understanding. —Stanley Moss

Michael Schmidt is one of literature’s most ambitious champions, riding out against the naysayers, the indifferent, and the purse holders, determined to enlarge readers’ vision and rouse us all to pay attention. Were it not for his rich and adventurous catalogue of publications at Carcanet Press, and the efforts of a few other brave spirits at other small presses (such as Bloodaxe Books) the landscape of poetry in the U.K. would be depopulated, if not desolate. He has now turned his prodigious energies to telling the story of the novel’s transformation through time: a Bildungsroman of the genre from a persevering and unappeasable lover. —Marina Warner

Michael Schmidt is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow and a writer in residence at St John’s College, Cambridge. He is founder and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press.

Book Details

6-3/8 x 10 inches
Belknap Press

Recommendations

Song of Ourselves

Forget English!

Theory of the Novel

World Philology

Seven Modes of Uncertainty

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The 33 Best Biographical Fiction Novels for Historical Fiction Lovers

I’ve always gravitated toward biographical fiction novels. There is something about reading someone’s fictional biography that makes me feel so connected to them.

I generally find biographies to be rather dull, but when they are fictionalized I immediately get drawn into their world. I often find myself googling images or doing further research because I’m so entranced.

That’s why I wanted to gather all my favorite biographical novels in one place. You’ll find fictionalized biographies of princesses, rebels, spies, snipers, and writers below.

*Biographical Fiction Post contains affiliate links. Purchases made through links result in a small commission to us at no cost to you. Some books have been gifted. All opinions are our own.

This post fulfills a prompt for the 2024 reading challenge ! It’s not too late to join!

Article Contents

Biographical Novels Set in America

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murphy

July 2021 Good Morning America Book Club Pick

This fictionalized version of Belle de Costa Greene was wonderful, I’m so glad it was a GMA pick and a Gilded Age book to boot!

Greene was J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian and later the librarian for his heir. She was also a black woman passing as white. She had to keep her roots hidden in order to hold her job, but I’m glad her real truth is being told now.

Find This Book in: Books set in Libraries

The Invention of Wings

Author : Sue Monk Kidd

Year : 2014

Genre : Historical Fiction

More info: January 2014 Oprah’s Book Club Pick

Age Range : 18+

I picked this book up in Charleston when I was there for a visit in October of 2018. I wanted to pick up a book about the city. When I found out that our hotel was next to the Grimke sister’s home, I knew this was the book for me.

This book tells the story of Sarah Grimke, one of the first female abolitionists, and the enslaved Handful. Starting in Charleston on a plantation and ending in Philadelphia in the pre-civil war era, the story explores the life of Sarah, the daughter of a slaveholder, as she fights for the rights of women and enslaved people.

Why Kirsten like it

I found the story compelling – the political portion of Sarah’s work was particularly appealing. Sue Monk Kidd is a fantastic writer and the story flowed in such a wonderful way.

While I learned many valuable lessons, it did give me pause that the story was written by a white woman. I would recommend All We Were Promised by Ashton Lattimore if you are looking for an additional account of the problems facing enslaved people at this time.

Find this book in : Biographical Fiction Novels / Oprah’s Book Club / Fiction Books About Women in Politics

Carnegie’s Maid by Marie Benedict

First off look at this COVER! I loved this biographical novel but I’m sad my copy is an ebook because now I think I need to get the hardback version.

The story revolves around Andrew Carnegie’s housemaid and their fictional relationship. It was fascinating to learn about life in Pittsburg during the 1860s. This story particularly focuses on the different social classes of the American Industrial Revolution.

Caroline: The Little House Revisited by Sarah Miller

I read Little House on the Prairie for the first time earlier this year mostly because I wanted the background for this exact book. The entire time I was reading the original series, I found myself wondering about the choices the parents were making.

I wanted to know why certain things were being done and I finally got my answers in Sarah Miller’s classic retelling of the story. I didn’t love Little House, but I ADORED Caroline. This fictionalized biography is better than the original series in my opinion.

Marlene by C.W. Gortner

When it comes to books like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, this would be a natural story to gravitate toward. I found the story to be focused too much on Marlene’s exploits as a bi-sexual woman. Yes, that’s groundbreaking – but it’s not all that defined her.

Which is why she fell flat as a character. I wanted more of her war-time efforts, more of her Hollywood life, more of her relationship with her daughter – just more substance in general. The writing and research were impeccable, as usual, it just didn’t live up to what I thought it could be.

Political Biographical Fiction

Jacqueline in Paris by Ann Mah

I had no idea that Jackie Kennedy spent a year abroad living in Paris in the year following the end of WWII. I was fascinated by Ann Mah’s take on what Jackie would have seen in post-war France.

This fictional biography covered it all! The rise of communism, the French people’s disdain for Americans, the struggle to make ends meet for many citizens, and the return to the glitz and glam of the gilded aristocracy.

As far as historical fiction books go, it was one of the most unique ones I’ve read in recent years. I immediately gave it to my francophile mother because I know she will adore it. This book was a must for our ultimate beach reads 2023 post.

American Princess by Stephanie Marie Thornton

We all know I love a good Royal Read but I don’t usually get to read a book about American royalty. We may not have an actual royal family, but dynasties like the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Kennedys, and Roosevelts serve as good replacements. This story is about Alice Roosevelt, daughter of our 26th president, Teddy Roosevelt.

This historical fiction novel covers her life from the moment her father became President to her second breast cancer surgery. And what a doozy of a life she led! I couldn’t help wondering how her antics would have been perceived had she lived in today’s society. I read it in a few days and adored it! #gifted

The Kennedy Debutante

Author : Kerri Maher

Year : 2018

I had no idea the Kennedy girls were just as interesting at the Kennedy boys. This Historical Fiction biography told the story of Kick Kennedy during her stay in London before and during WWII. I found her to be a fascinating character.

Kick was a rebel, following her heart and standing up for what she believed in. I had so much sympathy for everything she went through in her life.

Why Kirsten loves it

I always love Kerri Maher’s historical fiction novels and this was no exception. Kick was one of the most fascinating subjects for a biographical fiction that I have ever read. I spent so much time googling photos of her during this time of her life that I felt like I knew her by the time the book was finished.

Find this book in : Biographical Fiction Novels / Best Books about WWII / Books About Women in Politics

Jackie and Maria

Author : Gill Paul

Year : 2020

Most people know about Jackie’s life during her White House years, but hearing the tale of what caused her to marry Aristotle Onassis was fascinating. I loved the dual narrators of Jackie and Onassis’s long-time lover, opera singer Maria Callas.⁣ It’s a perfect political novel about music!

Excuse me while I gush about Gill Paul‘s newest biographical fiction book, Jackie and Maria.⁣ Gill Paul is quickly becoming an auto-buy author for me. I loved Another Woman’s Husband and The Lost Daughter, about the Windsors and Romanovs respectively. Paul’s take on a new dynasty, The Kennedys, is equally compelling.⁣

Find this book in : Novels About Music / Biographical Fiction / Books About Women in Politics

18 Fun Fiction and Non-Fiction Books About Women in Politics

For more biographical fiction about political figures, check out this post.

Historical Biographical Fiction about the British Monarchy

An Indiscreet Princess: A Novel of Queen Victoria’s Defiant Daughter by Georgie Blalock

Well before Princess Diana, Meghan Markle, and Wallis Simpson, there was another royal rebel – Lady Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. And what a rebel she was! Why are there not more royal reads about her?

In the late 1800s, it was Louise, an artist, and sculptor, who was seen as quite rebellious. She took courses for the arts at a public school, talked back to the queen, and even had pre- and extra-marital affairs! Quite the scandal for the time.

I loved getting a look at one of the lesser-known (to me) royal figures. I hope to learn about more of Queen Victoria’s offspring in the future.

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

The White Queen is one of my favorite Philippa Gregory novels, revolving around Elizabeth Woodville and her relationship with the King of England. I love the magical elements of this book as Elizabeth and her mother were said to be witches. We had to put this on our list of witch books.

It’s a really wonderful story. I learned so much about the tumultuous history of Britain. Also of note, Elizabeth was the mother of the boys in the tower which this book covers as well. If you love biographical novels, Philippa Gregory has written more than a dozen for you to read.

Find this book in Biographical Fiction / Best Witch Books / Books with Colors in the Title

American Duchess by Karen Harper

This particular biographical fiction book spans the same time period at Downton Abbey. It too features an American Heiress wed in London society to infuse a ducal estate with much-needed funds.

Unlike Lady Cora, the heroine of this story is a real historical figure. Consuelo Vanderbilt’s wedding to the Duke of Marlborough was considered the wedding of the century at the time, but their marriage left something to be desired.

Consuelo is forced to take up the mantle of duty for her estate and title, and in doing so, she finds her inner strength.

Modern Biographical Novels about the British Royal Family

Before the Crown by Flora Harding

After all the royal reads I’ve read over the years, I can’t believe this is my first story about The Queen’s romance with Prince Philip. With the Jubilee coming up now in England, this was a perfect fictionalized biography to read!

I was wondering about how Philip won the heart of then Princess Elizabeth, and this fictional story filled in some fun details. Think of it as a prequel to the first episode of The Crown in the best way!

Every royal-obsessed person needs to add this pick from Books about Queen Elizabeth II to their TBR list and check out our list of books like the crown !

The Queen’s Secret by Karen Harper

I don’t think enough is written about Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. She was a dynamic lady who was a guiding light for her husband, King George, as well as Queen Elizabeth. This biographical novel focuses on her work behind-the-scenes during WWII.

We get an inside look at the issues between her husband and his brother, King Edward, who abdicated to be with Wallis Simpson. Churchill’s relationship with the then Queen consort is also examined. We love the unique perspective of this pick from books about WWII.

The Other Windsor Girl and more books about Queen Elizabeth II.

The Other Windsor Girl by Georgie Blalock

I knew a little about Princess Margaret from what I gleaned from The C rown, but it was nice to focus on her as the main character. I can’t imagine what it would have been like had she been the Queen of England.

She actually reminded me a lot of Wallace Simpson. She was most definitely a royal rebel. She’s still not my favorite royal but this historical fiction biography helped me understand her life, personality, and pressures. This book about QEII will give you a different perspective on being a royal.

We included this pick as one of our favorite books about the royal family for book clubs ! So it obviously needed to be in our list of books for book clubs as well.

The Duchess by Wendy Holden

This intimate look at Wallis Simpson was wonderfully written. Never have I had compassion for the Duchess of Windsor in the way I did when I read this historical fiction biography.

Holden’s portrayal of this controversial historical figure focused on the time period when Wallis and King Edward fell in love, but also the time period after his death.

I actually felt bad for both the king, who clearly didn’t want the crown, and the woman he both loved and used to get out of his royal duties. There is so much to talk about it this book about Wallis Simpson, which is why we love this book for book clubs.

Love royal reads ? Check out the dozens we’ve rounded up here!

13 Captivating Books about the Royal Family

For more biographical fiction books about the British royal family, head to this post.

Fictional Biography Novels Set in France

The Queen of Paris by Pamela Binnings Ewen

I had such mixed feelings reading this biographical novel, in a good way. I hated Chanel who is a ruthless, shrewd woman who will do whatever she needs to in order to succeed, even becoming a nazi spy. I felt no sympathy for her, only disgust… and yet …. ⁣ ⁣ The writing drew me in. I don’t agree with Chanel’s choices, but I was intrigued by her life during the war and all she did to try to save her own skin. This pick from books about WWII is a must-read.

It was fascinating to read about regardless of my personal feelings about the heroine of the story. She’s not written to be liked, but rather to be examined and no list of books set in Paris would be complete without her.⁣ ⁣ I’d recommend this fictionalized biography if you are looking to uncover the more sinister side of the renowned icon.

Code Name Helene and more of the best books of 2020

Code Name Hélène: A Novel by Ariel Lawson

I LOVED this book so much. It is so beautifully written, amazingly researched, and absolutely enthralling. This book is based on the life of Nancy Wake, a nurse and journalist who became a Special Operations Executive during WWII. ⁣

She was an amazing woman and I had never heard of her before this fictional biography. It has wonderful characters, a fabulous story, romance, adventure, and the terrifying reality of life during WWII.

Find this book in Historical Fiction Books / Best Books for Book Clubs

The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer

This historical fiction novel is about real-life photographer and model, Lee Miller. I had never heard about Miller prior to this book, though I was familiar with her lover – Man Ray.

Why We Loved it: She made some life choices that I can’t say I agree with, but I found her to be a strong, feminist woman ahead of her time. This book is a five star read, but be warned – there are some erotic scenes in the novel.

Find this book in Biographical Fiction / Best Books of 2019 / Jazz Age Novels / Art Novels / Best Book Club Books

Mademoiselle Chanel by C. W. Gortner

Coco Chanel is a fascinating woman, who is famed for her stylish, sophisticated fashions. Yet this story explores her connection to the Nazis during WWII and just how far she would go to stay on top.

Why We Loved it: I loved this story, but ended up hating the woman it was about. I grew up loving Chanel designs and idolizing the fashion icon. However, when I learned more about her life, I was scandalized and horrified….but I couldn’t put it down!

Find this book in Books set in the 1920s , Biographical Fiction / Fashion Novels / Books Set in France

16 Sensational Books Set in France to Love

Love when Frace is the setting of a book? We do too! That’s why we created this list.

Fictionalized Biographies about Authors

The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

Author : Marie Benedict

Genre : Historical Mystery

Age Range : 16+

⁣Marie Benedict is the master of bringing women back to life in her historical fiction novels. The Mystery of Mrs. Christie is my favorite to date and I found it hard to put down. ⁣In December 1926, Agatha Christie went missing for 11 days. She re-emerged as mysteriously as she disappeared and more questions than answers persist.

Why Jackie loves it

Benedict does a wonderful job of building the mystery using her brilliant imagination and bringing us into the world of Agatha Christie. It is the perfect blend of fiction and mystery and is an absolute delight.

Find this book in : Historical Mystery Books / Books about Writers / Books About Books / Biographical Fiction Novel / 1920s Novels

Bronte’s Mistress by Finola Austin

I’m a sucker for the classics, but I don’t know much about the authors of the classics I love. Of course, I knew of the Bronte sisters, but I had no idea that they had a brother or that he was a naughty one 😉.⁣ How could i not read this pick from novels about writers?

This story was fascinating to me because while I don’t condone modern-day infidelity, I understand how women back in the day had limited options. I loved Lydia and her (selfish) views of the world around her and I felt how hard it must be to be a woman in historic times.⁣

Her antics were utterly entertaining as were the antics of her children. I was rooting for her the entire time, even when I wanted to slap her and tell her to come to her senses.⁣

Z – A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Zelda Fitzgerald gets her moment in the sun in this fictionalized biography of her life. Zelda, often belittled by her husband, was actually the muse behind his stories.

He drew inspiration from her diary and her life for characters like Daisy in The Great Gatsby. Yet, their marriage kept Zelda from reaching her own greatest potential. A fascinating character study of the woman behind the man.

The Christie Affair

Author : Nine de Gramont

Year : 2022

More info: February 2022 Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick

I adored this mystery novel set during the 11 days of Agatha Christie’s disappearance. It’s told from the perspective of Christie’s husband’s mistress and it is utterly absorbing.

This biographical fiction novel is totally fictional because there is no account of what actually happened to Agatha Christie during her missing days. There are layers of mystery throughout, with a side of a love story.

I never felt I would be able to sympathize with a mistress but I was cheering for her by the end. I was also enchanted by the setting of the small hotel. If you love historical mystery books, this is a must-read.

Find this book in : Biographical Fiction Novels / Historical Mystery Books / Hotel Novels / Ultimate List of Mystery Books

Romanov Family Biographical Fiction Novels

The Tsarina’s Daughter by Ellen Alpsten

I’ve been enthralled with the Romanovs since I saw my first Faberge egg. While most of my reading has focused on the fall of the dynasty, I was intrigued by this biographical fiction novel set after the reign of Peter the Great.

Why We Liked It It was FASCINATING to see the cultural backdrop of Russia’s imperial court. I loved learning about the court intrigue and the ruthless way power changed hands.

Find this book in Cozy Winter Books / Royal Reads / Romanov Novels

The Last Grand Duchess by Bryn Turnbull

I love stories about the Romanov Dynasty. Ever since I saw a collection of Faberge eggs when I was a child, the story of the last members of the Russian Imperial family have always fascinated me.

This biographical historical fiction story revolves around the eldest daughter, Olga. Its dual timeline switches between the family’s life after the revolution and Olga’s childhood and the events that lead to the revolution in the first place.

Why We Loved It: We all know how this tragic story ends, so this book is all about the journey. I love that Turnbull focused on a sister other than Anastasia.

Find this book in Ultimate Beach Reads 2022 / Romanov Historical Fiction / Biographical Fiction

The Romanov Empress by C.W. Gortner

If you are into biographical historical fiction, this is a great one for your list. I had no idea that the Tsarina was such a force.

Think the British Monarchy is the only one with scandalous stories worth telling? Think again! This book is all about Empress Marina’s life. As the mother of the last Tsar of Russia, it was compelling to read about the events of the Russian Revolution as they unfolded.

I loved how the author laid out the family’s struggle with adjusting to the people’s needs. Empress Alexandra and her dependent relationship with Rasputin is also covered in the novel. I’d love to see a mini-series made about this family.

The Lost Daughter by Gill Paul

Why We Liked it: Maria’s story drew me in immediately, but I floundered a bit when it skipped over to Val’s portions. I just didn’t feel a connection to her and found myself wishing it would get back to Maria’s parts. Still, it was a good biographical historical fiction royal novel if you are interested in a lesser-known Romanov.

Find this book in Books about the Romanovs / Books like The Crown / Biographical Fiction

More Royal Biographical Fiction

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

December 2022 Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick

I couldn’t put down this biographical fiction book set in Italy in the 1550s. Maggie O’Farrell just has a way of writing that is utterly captivating.

It’s the story of Lucrezia, daughter of the Grand Duke of Florence, and her unfortunate life as a child bride to the ruler of Ferrara. I always thought that British royal history had all drama, but this story proved me wrong! Those Italians are masters at the art of poison and murder.

I found the story, which also revolves around the painting of the titular marriage portrait, to be fast-moving and fascinating. It’s one of those historical fiction books that had me googling what was real and what truths were bent.

The Girl in White Gloves by Kerri Maher

I adored this royal read about Grace Kelly and had trouble putting it down. The storyline is split between Grace’s rise to Hollywood stardom and her future as a settled princess. The writing was so captivating that I found myself sneaking pages on my Kindle all over town.

Kerri Maher brought Grace Kelly to life in this biographical fiction book about her life. I had no idea about her home life struggles, her many romances, or the state of her marriage to Rainer.

Find this book in Biographical Fiction / Books Like Evelyn Hugo / Books with a color in the Title / Books Like the Crown

The Queen’s Fortune by Allison Pataki

The Queen’s Fortune had everything I love in a historical fiction novel – royalty, drama, a touch of romance, a strong female protagonist, and action. This book starts out all action and it doesn’t let up!⁣

I devoured the story of Napoleon, his former lover, and the dynasty that he helped her create with her eventual husband, who happened to be his #1 frenemy. They didn’t know what frenemies we’re back then but Napoleon and Bernadotte were the OGs.⁣

This is one of the biographical fiction books set in France that we could have put in so many categories and is a great place to start.

The Second Duchess by Elizabeth Loupas

The Duke of Ferrara has taken a second wife after possibility having killed his first duchess. While first ignoring the rumors, soon Barbara decides she needs to investigate what happened to Lucrezia de Medici.

I liked the mystery aspects of this biographical fiction story. I was certainly living in fear that something would befall Barbara as her pool of suspects grew larger.

More Biographical Historical Fiction Novels

Diva by Daisy Goodwin

Daisy Goodwin has done it again with this incredible biographical fiction about Maria Callas, famed Opera singer, and lover of Aristotle Onassis.

As usual with Daisy Goodwin’s stories, I found myself transfixed by the story of Maria’s life and her relationship with Onassis. It was fascinating to see how their courtship affected her performances and how she grew to become an unstoppable force in an industry ruled by men.

Why we like it: I had previously read Gill Paul‘s story Jackie & Maria and thought I might find this book redundant, but I was wrong. They bring two different perspectives that flush out the Maria – Onassis- Jackie O love triangle. #gifted by St. Martins Press

Find this book in Music Books / Biographical Fiction / New Historical Fiction Books

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

I had this book on my TBR for so long and I am so happy that I finally had a chance to read it. This is the story of Shakespeare’s life, family, and extraordinary wife during the time of the plague.

Shakespeare himself is never actually mentioned by name in this extraordinary and heartbreaking book that was so hard to put down. I know why it made so many lists of top books for 2020. And if you are looking for biographical novels about writers, this one is a must-read.

Find this book in Biographical Fiction Novels / Books About Books

The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba by Chanel Cleeton

Chanel Cleeton is back with a prequel to the Perez family story. This time, she examines their ancestor, Marina during the 1896 war between Spain and the US on Cuban soil. This is one of our favorite Gilded Age books set internationally.

Evangelina Cisneros, dubbed The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba by the New York newspapers, and journalist Grace Harrington’s stories are also the focus of this biographical novel.

Why I Liked it: Cleeton’s vivid imagery and captivating stories make learning about Cuba’s tragic history compelling and helps give context to the Cuba we know today.

Find this book in Gilded Age Books / Biographical Fiction / Chanel Cleeton Books

The Diamond Eye and more goodreads choice awards 2022 books

The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn

Kate Quinn’s stories of the women heroes of WWII continue to dazzle every time. The subject for this story is Soviet Sniper Mila Pavlichenko, commonly known as Lady Death.

The story flashes between her time in on a diplomatic tour of the U.S. when she befriended Eleanor Roosevelt and her life leading up to and during the war. We learn about what motivated her to become the most decorated sniper in the army, what life was like on the battlefields of war, and how love plays a role in her life.

But the tension is really heightened by the narration of an assassin out to kill President Roosevelt and frame Mila for the murder. I adored this biographical historical fiction story by Quinn.

Which biographical fiction novel are you most interested in reading?

Ultimate List of Historical Fiction

Love Historical Fiction? The Ultimate List of Historical Fiction is the perfect list for you. It is carefully divided by time.

Co-Founder and Creative Director

As a mother of two boys, Kirsten rediscovered her life-long love for reading while choosing appropriate books for her children. She started this website with Jackie to share their passion for literacy with other moms and kids. She uses her years of experience in marketing and public relations to create quarterly magazines, implement social media strategy, and ensure the website content is relevant and beautiful.

What Is a Novel? Definition and Characteristics

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M.F.A, Dramatic Writing, Arizona State University
B.A., English Literature, Arizona State University
B.A., Political Science, Arizona State University

A novel is a narrative work of prose fiction that tells a story about specific human or character experiences over a considerable length.

Prose style and length, as well as fictional or semi-fictional subject matter, are the most clearly defining characteristics of a novel. Unlike works of epic poetry, it tells its story using prose rather than verse ; unlike short stories , it tells a lengthy narrative rather than a brief selection. There are, however, other characteristic elements that set the novel apart as a particular literary form.

Key Takeaways: What Is A Novel?

A novel is a work of prose fiction that tells a narrative over an extended length.
Novels date as far back as 1010's Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu; European novels first appeared in the early seventeenth century.
Novels overtook epic poetry and chivalric romances as the most popular mode of storytelling, with an emphasis on the personal reading experience.
Today, novels come in a wide array of subgenres.

Definition of a Novel

For the most part, novels are dedicated to narrating individual experiences of characters , creating a closer, more complex portrait of these characters and the world they live in. Inner feelings and thoughts, as well as complex, even conflicting ideas or values are typically explored in novels, more so than in preceding forms of literature. It’s not just the stories themselves that are more personal, but the experience of reading them as well. Where epic poetry and similar forms of storytelling were designed to be publicly read or consumed as an audience, novels are geared more towards an individual reader.

What is a novel? The following traits must be present for a work to be considered a novel:

Written in prose, as opposed to verse . Narrators may have different degrees of knowledge or different points of view ( first person versus third person and so on). While stylized novels such as epistolary novels do exist, the key distinction here is between prose and verse.
Of considerable length/word count. There is no specific word count that automatically makes a work a novel, but in general, a short novel would be considered a novella, and even shorter than that would be short fiction.
Fictional content. Semi-fictionalized novels (such as historical works inspired by true events or persons) exist, but a work of pure non-fiction cannot be classified as a novel.
Individualism, both on the page and for the intended audience.

In the everyday vernacular, the novel has come to be associated most closely with fiction , as opposed to nonfiction. For the most part, that association stands: not all fiction is novels, but all novels are fiction. A non-fiction prose work that is of the same length as a novel could fall into several other categories, such as historiography, biography, and so on.

Although a novel is typically a work of fiction, many novels do weave in real human history. This can range from full-fledged novels of historical fiction—which focus on a specific era in history or depict semi-fictional narrative about real historical persons—to works of fiction that simply exist in the “real” world and carry that baggage and implications. There also are early modern works of historical nonfiction that were embellished with unconfirmed traditions or made-up speeches for dramatic effect. Despite this, we can assume that, when we’re talking about novels, we’re talking about works of narrative fiction.

Types of Novels

Novels come in all styles imaginable, with every author bringing their own unique voice to the table. There are a handful of major subgenres that tend to make up a large share of the market, although there are many other genres (and mash-ups of genres) out there. A few of the major types of novels you might need to know about:

Mystery novels

Mystery novels revolve around a crime that must be solved, often a murder but not always. The traditional format will have a detective—either professional or amateur—as the protagonist, surrounded by a group of characters who help solve the crime or are suspects. Over the course of the story, the detective will sift through clues, including false leads and red herrings, to solve the case. Some of the best-known novels of all time fall into the mystery genre, including the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels, and Agatha Christie’s novels. Christie’s And Then There Were None is the world’s best-selling mystery novel.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

One of the more popular genres of novels is science fiction and fantasy, which both deal with speculative world building. The lines between the two are often blurred, but in general, science fiction tends to imagine a world that’s different because of technology, while fantasy imagines a world with magic. Early science fiction included the works of Jules Verne and continued on through George Orwell’s seminal classics such as 1984 ; contemporary science fiction is a highly popular genre. Some of the best-known novels in Western literature are fantasy novels, including the Lord of the Rings series, The Chronicles of Narnia , and Harry Potter ; they owe their debt to European epic literature.

Horror/thriller novels

Thriller novels are occasionally combined with other genres, most often with mystery or science fiction. The defining characteristic is that these novels are often designed to induce a sense of fear, suspense, or psychological horror in the reader. Early versions of this genre included The Count of Monte Cristo (a revenge thriller) and Heart of Darkness (a psychological/horror thriller novella). More contemporary examples might be the novels of Stephen King.

Romance novels of the present day have some things in common with “romances” of the past: the idea of romantic love as an end goal, the occasional scandal, intense emotions at the center of it all. Today’s romances, however, are more specifically focused on telling a story of a romantic and/or sexual love between characters. They often follow highly specific structures and are all but required to have an optimistic or “happy” resolution. Romance is currently the most popular novel genre in the United States.

Historical Fiction

Just like its name suggests, historical fiction is simply a fictional story that takes place at some real, past time in human history. Some instances of historical fiction involve fictional (or semi-fictional) stories about actual historical figures, while others insert wholly original characters into real-life events. Iconic works of historical fiction include Ivanhoe , A Tale of Two Cities , Gone with the Wind , and The Hunchback of Notre Dame .

Realist Fiction

Realist fiction is, quite simply, fiction that eschews heightened genre or style to attempt to tell a story that “could” take place in the world as we know it. The focus is on representing things truthfully, without romanticization or artistic flourishes. Some of the best-known realist authors include Mark Twain , John Steinbeck , Honoré de Balzac, Anton Chekhov, and George Eliot.

Novel Structure and Elements

A novel can be structured in a myriad of ways. Most commonly, novels will be structured chronologically, with story segments divided into chapters. However, this is not the only structural option for authors.

Dividing Up the Story

Chapters tend to revolve around some small portion of the novel that is unified by a character, theme, or piece of plot. In larger novels, chapters may be grouped together into even larger sections, perhaps grouped by time period or an overarching portion of the story. The division into smaller "chunks" of story is one of the defining elements of a novel; a story that's short enough to not need such divisions is likely not lengthy enough to qualify as a full-lengthy novel.

Timelines and Points of View

Authors may choose to structure novels in a variety of different ways. Instead of telling a story chronologically , for instance, the story may toggle between different time periods in order to maintain suspense or make a thematic point. Novels may also switch between the perspectives of multiple characters, rather than focusing on a single character as the sole protagonist. A novel may be told in the first person (narrated by a character) or in the third person (narrated by an outside "voice" with varying degrees of knowledge).

Three-Act Structure

Regardless of the time frame, a novel’s plot will often follow what is known as the three-act structure. The opening chapters will be concerned with acquainting readers with the main cast of characters and the world of the story, before a specific incident, typically referred to as the “inciting incident,” shakes up the status quo and launches the “real” story. From that point, the story (now in “Act 2”) will enter a series of complications as the protagonist pursues some goal, encountering obstacles and smaller goals along the way. At the midpoint of the story, there will often be some major shift that raises the stakes, all leading up to the emotional and narrative climax towards the end of the novel. “Act 3” concerns itself with this finale and the fallout .

Burgess, Anthony. "Novel." Encyclopaedia Britannica , https://www.britannica.com/art/novel .
Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Kuiper, Kathleen, ed. Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature . Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1995.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel . University of California Press, 2001.
Romanticism in Literature: Definition and Examples
Gothic Literature
What Is a Foil Character in Literature?
What Literature Can Teach Us
What Is Burlesque Literature?
Understanding Mystery Writing
An Introduction to Metafiction
Characters' Thoughts and Motivations in Psychological Realism
What Is Resolution in Literature?
What Is an Antagonist?
What Is a Soliloquy? Literary Definition and Examples
How a Narrative Arc Structures a Story
The Definition of Quest in Literature
Falling Action in Literature
What Is the Canon in Literature?
Medieval Chivalric Romance

What Is a Biography?

Learning from the experiences of others is what makes us human.

At the core of every biography is the story of someone’s humanity. While biographies come in many sub-genres, the one thing they all have in common is loyalty to the facts, as they’re available at the time. Here’s how we define biography, a look at its origins, and some popular types.

“Biography” Definition

A biography is simply the story of a real person’s life. It could be about a person who is still alive, someone who lived centuries ago, someone who is globally famous, an unsung hero forgotten by history, or even a unique group of people. The facts of their life, from birth to death (or the present day of the author), are included with life-changing moments often taking center stage. The author usually points to the subject’s childhood, coming-of-age events, relationships, failures, and successes in order to create a well-rounded description of her subject.

Biographies require a great deal of research. Sources of information could be as direct as an interview with the subject providing their own interpretation of their life’s events. When writing about people who are no longer with us, biographers look for primary sources left behind by the subject and, if possible, interviews with friends or family. Historical biographers may also include accounts from other experts who have studied their subject.

The biographer’s ultimate goal is to recreate the world their subject lived in and describe how they functioned within it. Did they change their world? Did their world change them? Did they transcend the time in which they lived? Why or why not? And how? These universal life lessons are what make biographies such a meaningful read.

Origins of the Biography

Greco-Roman literature honored the gods as well as notable mortals. Whether winning or losing, their behaviors were to be copied or seen as cautionary tales. One of the earliest examples written exclusively about humans is Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (probably early 2 nd century AD). It’s a collection of biographies in which a pair of men, one Greek and one Roman, are compared and held up as either a good or bad example to follow.

In the Middle Ages, Einhard’s The Life of Charlemagne (around 817 AD) stands out as one of the most famous biographies of its day. Einhard clearly fawns over Charlemagne’s accomplishments throughout, yet it doesn’t diminish the value this biography has brought to centuries of historians since its writing.

Considered the earliest modern biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) by James Boswell looks like the biographies we know today. Boswell conducted interviews, performed years of research, and created a compelling narrative of his subject.

The genre evolves as the 20th century arrives, and with it the first World War. The 1920s saw a boom in autobiographies in response. Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That (1929) is a coming-of age story set amid the absurdity of war and its aftermath. That same year, Mahatma Gandhi wrote The Story of My Experiments with Truth , recalling how the events of his life led him to develop his theories of nonviolent rebellion. In this time, celebrity tell-alls also emerged as a popular form of entertainment. With the horrors of World War II and the explosion of the civil rights movement, American biographers of the late 20 th century had much to archive. Instantly hailed as some of the best writing about the war, John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) tells the stories of six people who lived through those world-altering days. Alex Haley wrote the as-told-to The Autobiography of Malcom X (1965). Yet with biographies, the more things change, the more they stay the same. One theme that persists is a biographer’s desire to cast its subject in an updated light, as in Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair that Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn (2016).

Types of Biographies

Contemporary Biography: Authorized or Unauthorized

The typical modern biography tells the life of someone still alive, or who has recently passed. Sometimes these are authorized — written with permission or input from the subject or their family — like Dave Itzkoff’s intimate look at the life and career of Robin Williams, Robin . Unauthorized biographies of living people run the risk of being controversial. Kitty Kelley’s infamous His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra so angered Sinatra, he tried to prevent its publication.

Historical Biography

The wild success of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is proof that our interest in historical biography is as strong as ever. Miranda was inspired to write the musical after reading Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton , an epic 800+ page biography intended to cement Hamilton’s status as a great American. Paula Gunn Allen also sets the record straight on another misunderstood historical figure with Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat , revealing details about her tribe, her family, and her relationship with John Smith that are usually missing from other accounts. Historical biographies also give the spotlight to people who died without ever getting the recognition they deserved, such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks .

Biography of a Group

When a group of people share unique characteristics, they can be the topic of a collective biography. The earliest example of this is Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pirates (1724), which catalogs the lives of notorious pirates and establishes the popular culture images we still associate with them. Smaller groups are also deserving of a biography, as seen in David Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street , a mesmerizing behind-the-scenes look at the early years of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña as they establish the folk scene in New York City. Likewise, British royal family fashion is a vehicle for telling the life stories of four iconic royals – Queen Elizabeth II, Diana, Kate, and Meghan – in HRH: So Many Thoughts on Royal Style by style journalist Elizabeth Holmes.

Autobiography

This type of biography is written about one’s self, spanning an entire life up to the point of its writing. One of the earliest autobiographies is Saint Augustine’s The Confessions (400), in which his own experiences from childhood through his religious conversion are told in order to create a sweeping guide to life. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of six autobiographies that share all the pain of her childhood and the long road that led to her work in the civil rights movement, and a beloved, prize-winning writer.

Memoirs are a type of autobiography, written about a specific but vital aspect of one’s life. In Toil & Trouble , Augusten Burroughs explains how he has lived his life as a witch. Mikel Jollett’s Hollywood Park recounts his early years spent in a cult, his family’s escape, and his rise to success with his band, The Airborne Toxic Event. Barack Obama’s first presidential memoir, A Promised Land , charts his path into politics and takes a deep dive into his first four years in office.

Fictional Biography

Fictional biographies are no substitute for a painstakingly researched scholarly biography, but they’re definitely meant to be more entertaining. Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler constructs Zelda and F. Scott’s wild, Jazz-Age life, told from Zelda’s point of view. The Only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict brings readers into the secret life of Hollywood actress and wartime scientist, Hedy Lamarr. These imagined biographies, while often whimsical, still respect the form in that they depend heavily on facts when creating setting, plot, and characters.

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How to Write a Biography: A Step-by-Step Guide

By Hannah Yang

What is a biography, a step-by-step guide to writing a biography, tips for how to write a great biography, conclusion on how to write a biography.

Writing a biography can be a rewarding endeavor, but it can also feel a bit daunting if you’ve never written one before.

Whether you’re capturing the life story of a famous person, a family member, or even yourself, creating a compelling biography involves a mix of thorough research, narrative skill, and a personal touch.

So, how exactly do you write a successful biography?

In this guide, we’ll break down the essentials to help you craft a biography that’s both informative and engaging, as well as our top tips for how to make it truly shine.

A biography is a detailed account of someone’s life.

A well-written biography needs to be objective and accurate. At the same time, it needs to depict more than just the basic facts like birth, education, work, relationships, and death—it should also portray the subject’s personal experience of those events.

So, in addition to being a good researcher, a good biographer also needs to be a good storyteller. You should provide insights into the subject’s personality, motivations, and impact on the world around them.

What’s the Difference Between a Biography, a Memoir, and an Autobiography?

What's the difference between biography, memoir and autobiography?

Understanding the distinctions between different genres of life writing is crucial for both writers and readers. Here’s a quick breakdown of the key differences between a biography and other related genres.

Biography: a detailed account of a person’s life, usually written in the third-person POV and supported by extensive research

Autobiography: a self-written account of the author’s own life, usually written in the first person POV and following a chronological order

Memoir: a collection of memories that an individual writes about moments or events that took place in their life, usually in the first person POV and in an introspective and personal way

Narrative nonfiction: a book that tells true stories using the techniques of fiction writing, such as character development, narrative arc, and detailed settings

Best Biography Examples to Study

The best way to learn how to write well is to read other successful books within the genre you’re writing.

Here are five great biographies to add to your reading list. For a longer list, check out our article on the 20 best biographies to read .

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand: the incredible true story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympian and World War II hero.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson: a comprehensive and engaging account of the Apple co-founder’s life.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow: the biography that inspired the hit musical, providing a deep dive into Hamilton ’ s life and legacy.

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford: a nuanced story that uncovers the family connection between the three Millay sisters and their mother.

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston: the story of Cudjo Lewis, one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade.

As with writing any book, writing a biography is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s easier to think of it as a series of smaller steps than as one big challenge to tackle.

Let’s break down the process step by step.

1. Choose Your Subject

Decide who you want to write about. It could be a well-known celebrity, a historical figure, or someone close to you.

In addition to figuring out who you’re writing about, this is also the step where you figure out why you want to write about them. Why is this a story worth telling, and what makes you interested in it?

Maybe the subject of your biography overcame major hardships in life to achieve success, and that story will inspire others facing similar struggles. Or maybe they made a really unique contribution to the world that not enough people know about, and you want to shine a bigger spotlight on that impact.

Knowing why you’re telling this story will help you make the right decisions about how to research, outline, draft, and edit your biography.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience is a crucial step in writing a good biography. You should tailor your biography to the interests and knowledge level of your audience.

A biography for a general audience will differ from one written for experts in a particular field. For example, two biographies about Emily Dickinson would be vastly different if one is written for young children and the other is written for adult poets.

3. Conduct Research

Dive deep into your research. Use a variety of sources to get a well-rounded view of your subject’s life. Take detailed notes and organize your findings.

Gather as much information as you can about your subject. This includes primary sources like interviews, letters, and diaries, as well as secondary sources such as books, articles, and documentaries.

Here are some primary sources to look for:

Letters and diaries: These provide intimate insights into the subject’s thoughts, feelings, and daily life, and can often be found in family archives, libraries, and historical societies.

Birth, marriage, and death certificates: These documents can provide crucial dates and familial relationships.

Census data: Census records can provide demographic information and track changes over time.

Property records: These can reveal where the subject lived and owned property.

Employment and school records: These records offer formalized insights into the subject’s education and career.

Military records: If applicable, military records can provide information on service, ranks, and honors.

Photos and videos: Look for photographs and videos in public libraries, historical societies, online databases like the Library of Congress, and family photo albums.

Historical newspapers: Access archives of local and national newspapers for articles, interviews, and obituaries related to the subject.

Digital archives: Use online resources like ProQuest, Chronicling America, and newspaper databases available through public libraries.

You can also look for secondary sources, which provide more context and perspective, such as:

Existing biographies: Search for existing biographies and books about the subject or their era. How does your project stand out from the crowd?

Academic articles and papers: Access journals through university libraries, which often have extensive collections of scholarly articles.

Documentaries and biographical films: You can often find these on streaming services or public television archives.

Websites and blogs: Look for reputable websites and blogs dedicated to the subject or related fields.

Social media platforms: The things people say on social media can offer insights into public perception about your subject.

Finally, you can also conduct your own interviews. Talk to the subject if they’re still alive, as well as their friends, family, and colleagues. You can ask them for personal anecdotes to add more color to your book, or more information to fill in any gaps in your knowledge.

4. Ask Engaging Questions

Great biographers start from a place of curiosity. Before you start writing, you should know the answers to the following questions:

What makes your subject’s story worth telling?

What was your subject’s childhood like?

What were your subject’s early interests and hobbies?

What level of education did your subject achieve and where did they study?

What was your subject’s personality like?

What were their beliefs and values?

How did your subject’s personality and beliefs change over time?

What were the major turning points in your subject’s life?

How was your subject affected by the major political, cultural, and societal events that occurred throughout their life?

What did their career path look like?

What were their major accomplishments?

What were their major failures?

How did they contribute to their field, their country, or their community?

Were they involved in any major controversies or scandals?

Who were the most important people in the subject’s life, such as friends, partners, or mentors?

If the subject is no longer living, how did they pass away?

What lasting impact did the subject leave behind?

5. Create an Outline

An outline helps you structure your biography. You can write an extensive outline that includes every scene you need to write, or you can keep it simple and just make a list of high-level bullet points—whatever works best for your writing process.

The best structure to use will depend on the shape of the story you’re trying to tell. Think about what your subject’s life looked like and what core messages you’re trying to leave the reader with.

If you want to keep things simple, you can simply go in chronological order. Tell the story from the birth of your subject to the death of your subject, or to the present day if this person is still living.

You can also use a more thematically organized structure, similar to what you would find on a Wikipedia page. You could break your book down into sections such as major life events, personal relationships, core accomplishments, challenges, and legacy.

Or, if you want to be more creative, you can use a nonlinear story structure, jumping between recent events and older flashbacks based on which events feel thematically tied together.

6. Write Your First Draft

Now that you have an outline, it’s time to sit down and write your first draft.

Your opening chapters should hook the reader and give a preview of what’s to come. Highlight a compelling aspect of the subject’s life to draw readers in.

In your middle chapters, cover all the key events you need to include about your subject’s life and weave in themes and anecdotes that reveal their personality and impact.

In your final chapters, wrap up your biography by summarizing the subject’s legacy and reflecting on their overall significance. This provides closure and leaves the reader with a lasting impression.

Remember that it’s okay if your first draft isn’t perfect. Your goal is simply to get words down on the page so you have something to edit.

7. Make Developmental Revisions

Now that you’re done with your first draft, it’s time to make big-picture revisions.

Review your biography for coherence and organization. Does the overall structure make sense? Are there any arcs or themes that aren’t given enough attention? Are there scenes or chapters that don’t need to be included?

8. Make Line Edits

Once you’ve completed your developmental edits, it’s time to make smaller line edits. This is your time to edit for grammar, punctuation, and style.

Make sure you keep a consistent voice throughout the book. Some biographies feel more conversational and humorous, while others are serious and sophisticated.

To get through your editing faster, you can run your manuscript through ProWritingAid , which will automatically catch errors, point out stylistic inconsistencies, and help you rephrase confusing sentences.

Don’t be afraid to ask others for feedback. No good book is written in a vacuum, and you can ask critique partners and beta readers to help you improve your work.

What makes a great biography stand out from the rest? Here are our best tips for how to take your manuscript to the next level.

Tip 1: Focus on Key Themes

Identify the central themes or patterns in the subject’s life—the ones that will really make readers keep thinking about your book. These could be related to the subject’s struggles, achievements, relationships, or values.

Tip 2: Balance Facts and Narrative

A good biography should read like a story, not a list of facts.

Use narrative techniques like imagery, character development, and dialogue to create a compelling and coherent story.

Tip 3: Add Your Own Perspective

Biographies need to be objective, but that doesn’t mean the author has to be entirely invisible. Including your own perspective can make the biography relatable and engaging.

Letting your voice shine can help illustrate the subject ’ s character and bring their story to life. It will also help make your biography stand out from the crowd.

Tip 4: Create a Timeline

Organize the key events of the subject’s life in chronological order. This will help you see the bigger picture and ensure you cover all important aspects.

Tip 5: Be Considerate

Because biographies are about real people, you should be mindful of who will be impacted by the story you’re telling, especially if your subject is still alive or still has living family members.

If the subject is still alive, ask them for permission to tell their story before you start writing. This also helps ensure that you don’t get sued.

Writing a biography is a journey of discovery, not just about the subject, but also about the craft of storytelling.

By combining thorough research, a clear structure, and engaging narrative techniques, you can create a biography that not only informs but also inspires and captivates your readers.

Don’t forget to run your manuscript through ProWritingAid so you can make sure your prose is as polished as possible.

Now, pick your subject, gather your resources, and start writing—there’s a fascinating story waiting to be told.

Good luck, and happy writing!

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Hannah Yang

Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction writer who writes about all things strange and surreal. Her work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, The Dark, and elsewhere, and two of her stories have been finalists for the Locus Award. Her favorite hobbies include watercolor painting, playing guitar, and rock climbing. You can follow her work on hannahyang.com, or subscribe to her newsletter for publication updates.

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The Novel: A Biography Hardcover – May 12, 2014

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography , Michael Schmidt does full justice to its complexity. Like his hero Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature , Schmidt chooses as his traveling companions not critics or theorists but “artist practitioners,” men and women who feel “hot love” for the books they admire, and fulminate against those they dislike. It is their insights Schmidt cares about. Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English. Schmidt believes there is something fundamentally subversive about art: he portrays the novel as a liberalizing force and a revolutionary stimulus. But whatever purpose the novel serves in a given era, a work endures not because of its subject, themes, political stance, or social aims but because of its language, its sheer invention, and its resistance to cliché―some irreducible quality that keeps readers coming back to its pages.

Print length 1200 pages
Language English
Publisher Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
Publication date May 12, 2014
Dimensions 6.37 x 2.15 x 10 inches
ISBN-10 9780674724730
ISBN-13 978-0674724730
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Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0674724739
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press; First Edition (May 12, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 1200 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780674724730
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674724730
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.04 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.37 x 2.15 x 10 inches
#489 in General Books & Reading
#2,616 in Literary Movements & Periods

About the author

Michael schmidt.

Michael Schmidt OBE FRSL is the founder and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited and the general editor of PN Review. He was until recently Professor of Poetry and convener of the Creative Writing programme in the Department of English, University of Glasgow. He has also been Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge, and Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is now Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester, editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Ltd and folunder and general editor of PN Review.

In 2013 he completed The Novel: A Biography, published in May 2014, a companion volume to Lives of the Poets (1999). His most recent anthologies include, The Great Modern Poets, published by Quercus on National Poetry Day 2006; Five American Poets (including Robert Hass, James McMichael, John Matthias, John Peck, and Robert Pinsky), published by Carcanet in 2010, New Poetries V, including 22 hitherto uncollected anglophone poets from around the world, in 2011, and New Poetries VI, including 21 hitherto uncollected anglophone poets in 2015; and New Poetries VII, including 22 hitherto uncollected poets, in 2018. New Poetries VIII, edited with John McAuliffe, came out in 2021. His collection of poems The Resurrection of the Body was published in 2007. His Collected Poems appeared in 2009 and The Stories of My Life in 2013. A Very Selected Poems appeared from The Poetry Business in 2018, and Talking to Stanley on the Telephone in 2020.

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Customers find the book very readable and insightful. They also say the author is a very good writer.

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Customers find the book brilliant, idiosyncratic, and a real pleasure to dip into for bedside reading.

"Comprehensive, yes. A pleasure to read . most defintely. A charming, witty, and insightful tome to the novel...." Read more

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"...Having said all of this, it is an important book , and one that should be read by anyone interested in the history of the English novel...." Read more

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Customers find the book insightful, brilliant, and powerfully argued. They also say the history is fascinating and idiosyncratic.

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Scriptwriting

What is a Novel – Definition, Types & Examples

T he novel, a long-form prose narrative that has captivated readers for centuries, holds a significant place in the realm of literature and culture. As a cornerstone of storytelling, novels transport us to new worlds, introduce us to unforgettable characters, and shed light on the human experience.

In this article, we will delve into the fascinating world of novels, exploring their origins, characteristics, impact on society, and the diverse array of genres and forms they encompass.

What is a Novel in Literature?

First, let’s define novel.

Throughout history, novels have evolved in style and structure, reflecting societal values and inspiring change. Before we dive into this, let’s take a look at the novel definition.

NOVEL DEFINITION

What is a novel in literature.

A novel is a lengthy, fictional narrative written in prose, typically focusing on the development of characters, an engaging plot structure, and a coherent theme. As a literary work, it provides readers with a window into the human experience, often exploring the complexities of emotions, relationships, and societal issues. Novels come in various genres and forms, offering diverse perspectives and storytelling techniques that captivate audiences and contribute to the rich tapestry of literature.

Characteristics of a novel:

Long-form prose narrative, well-developed characters, engaging plot structure, literary themes and messages, what is a novel in origin, history of the novel.

The novel's origins can be traced back to ancient literary works, such as the Greek romance Callirhoe by Chariton and the Latin novel The Golden Ass by Apuleius.

However, it was during the 18th century that the modern novel began to take shape, with the rise of prose narratives in Europe. Early examples include Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), which laid the foundation for the novel as a distinct literary form.

Don Quixote, often hailed as the first modern novel, holds significant importance as it revolutionized literature with its profound exploration of human nature and reality, setting a precedent for character development and narrative style in subsequent works.

Why should you read "Don Quixote"? • History of the Novel

Throughout history, numerous novels have left indelible marks on literature and society. Some of these influential works include:

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813): A seminal work of romantic fiction that offers keen insights into social norms and human relationships.

Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1860-1861): A bildungsroman exploring themes of personal growth, class, and social justice.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866): A psychological thriller delving into morality, guilt, and redemption.

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922): A groundbreaking modernist novel using stream-of-consciousness technique and innovative narrative structures.

The novel has undergone significant transformations since its inception, reflecting changes in society, culture, and literary techniques. The 19th century saw the rise of the serialized novel, with authors like Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle captivating readers through episodic storytelling. The 20th century brought experimental and modernist approaches, as seen in works by Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, pushing the boundaries of narrative structure and style.

In recent decades, the novel has continued to evolve, embracing diverse voices, perspectives, and genres. The rise of digital platforms and self-publishing has further expanded the landscape of novel writing, providing opportunities for new stories and innovative storytelling techniques to flourish.

What is a Novel Defined By?

Characteristics of a novel.

Novels possess distinct features that set them apart from other literary forms, providing readers with immersive and thought-provoking experiences. Let's delve into the key characteristics that define a novel:

One of the most distinguishing features of a novel is its length. Composed of an extended, continuous text, novels allow for in-depth exploration of characters, plotlines, and themes.

This long-form prose narrative sets novels apart from shorter forms like short stories and novellas, offering readers a more comprehensive and immersive reading experience.

At the heart of every novel are its characters. Novels typically feature complex, multi-dimensional characters who undergo growth or change throughout the story. These well-developed characters drive the plot, engage readers emotionally, and often serve as vehicles for exploring various aspects of the human experience.

For example, in Albert Camus' The Stranger , the protagonist Meursault is a well-developed character whose existentialist perspective, emotional detachment, and indifference towards societal norms offer a profound exploration of absurdism and the human condition.

The Stranger • Albert Camus

The events of a novel are arranged in a coherent and purposeful manner, creating an engaging narrative arc. Most novels incorporate elements such as exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution, which work together to keep readers invested in the story. The plot structure not only entertains but also helps convey the novel's themes and messages effectively.

Novels often explore underlying themes and messages that provide insight into emotions, relationships, society, and the world at large.

These themes can range from love and friendship to social issues and moral dilemmas, allowing authors to express their perspectives and engage readers in thought-provoking discussions. Through skillful storytelling, novels have the power to illuminate the complexities of the human experience and leave lasting impressions on readers.

Novel Meaning and Types

Types of novels.

Novels come in a wide array of genres and forms, offering readers diverse storytelling experiences that cater to different tastes and interests. In this section, we will explore types of novels in literature, some of the most popular literary genres, as well as various forms and structures that novels can take.

Literary genres

Literary genres are categories that classify literature based on shared themes, styles, and narrative elements. Literary genres not only provide a framework for authors to express their creativity but also help readers navigate the vast landscape of literature to find stories that resonate with them. Let’s explore literary genres.

Romance : This genre focuses on the development of romantic relationships between characters, often exploring themes of love, passion, and commitment. Examples include Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook .

Mystery : Mystery novels revolve around the solving of a puzzle or crime, typically involving a detective or amateur sleuth who uncovers hidden clues and motives. Famous examples include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot stories.

Sherlock Holmes • Example of Novel

Historical Fiction : This genre transports readers to the past, blending fictional characters and events with real historical settings and figures. Examples include Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth .

Fantasy : Fantasy novels create imaginative worlds filled with magic, mythical creatures, and fantastical elements. Well-known works include J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.

Forms and structures

Forms and structures in literature refer to the distinct narrative techniques and styles used to tell a story. These elements shape the way readers experience a narrative, offering innovative approaches to storytelling and adding depth to characters, plots, and themes.

Epistolary : Epistolary novels are written in the form of letters, diary entries, or other documents, allowing readers to experience the story through the characters' personal perspectives. Examples include Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Bram Stoker's Dracula .

Bildungsroman : This form, also known as a coming-of-age novel, follows the emotional and psychological development of a young protagonist as they navigate the challenges of life. Classic examples include Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye .

Catcher in the Rye • Example of Novel

Picaresque : Picaresque novels center around a roguish, lower-class protagonist who embarks on a series of episodic adventures, often satirizing social norms and institutions. Notable works include Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .

Stream of consciousness : This narrative technique captures the continuous flow of a character's thoughts and feelings, often eschewing conventional grammar and punctuation. Prominent examples include James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway .

Complete Guide to Literary Devices →
What is Theme in Literature and Film? →
Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar Winners →

Impact of Novels on Society

Novels have played a significant role in shaping society and culture throughout history, influencing public opinion, challenging norms, and inspiring change. In this section, we will explore the various ways novels have impacted our world:

Promoting empathy and understanding

By presenting readers with diverse perspectives and experiences, novels foster empathy and understanding for people from different walks of life. Through well-developed characters and immersive storytelling, novels allow readers to step into the shoes of others, breaking down barriers and promoting compassion.

How literature can help us develop empathy • Beth Ann Fennelly

Challenging social norms and sparking debate.

Many novels have stirred controversy by addressing taboo subjects or questioning societal norms. Works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and George Orwell's 1984 have challenged prevailing beliefs and sparked important conversations, ultimately contributing to social and political change.

Inspiring creativity and innovation

From science fiction's imaginative technologies to fantasy's magical realms, novels have inspired countless innovations and creative endeavors. By pushing the boundaries of imagination, novels encourage readers to think beyond the confines of reality and envision new possibilities.

Preserving and reflecting cultural identity

Novels often capture the essence of a particular time and place, preserving the cultural identity of a society for future generations. From regional dialects to historical events, novels serve as windows into the past, offering valuable insights into the lives and customs of different cultures.

Influencing language and communication

The language used in novels can shape and enrich our vocabulary, introducing new words and phrases that become part of everyday conversation. Additionally, literary techniques and styles pioneered by novelists often influence other forms of communication, such as television, journalism, and film adaptations.

This video by Now You See It analyzes the relationship between novels and film and the differences between the two.

Film vs Novels

Novels hold immense power in their ability to shape society, culture, and our understanding of the world. By offering diverse perspectives and challenging norms, they promote empathy, spark debate, and inspire creativity.

As windows into different cultures and eras, novels preserve and reflect cultural identity while also enriching language and communication. Ultimately, the impact of novels on our lives is both profound and far-reaching, highlighting the enduring importance of literature in human experience.

What Are Novels Today?

The modern novel.

As literature continues to evolve, the modern novel has emerged with distinct features that set it apart from its predecessors. In this section, we will discuss the innovations in storytelling and style, the increasing diversity in voices and perspectives, and the role of technology and digital platforms in shaping the contemporary literary landscape.

Innovations in storytelling and style

The modern novel has witnessed a surge in experimental narrative techniques and unconventional styles. Authors are pushing the boundaries of traditional storytelling by utilizing nonlinear timelines, multiple narrators, and innovative formats such as epistolary or mixed media. These creative approaches offer readers fresh and engaging experiences, redefining our understanding of what a novel can be.

Diversity in voices and perspectives

In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on amplifying diverse voices and perspectives within the literary world. The modern novel showcases stories from underrepresented communities, addressing themes related to race, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic backgrounds.

This shift towards inclusivity enriches our collective understanding of the human experience and fosters empathy for those whose stories have been historically marginalized.

The role of technology and digital platforms

Technology and digital platforms have had a significant impact on the modern novel, revolutionizing the way we consume and share literature.

E-books, audiobooks, and online publishing platforms have made novels more accessible, while social media and book clubs have created vibrant literary communities that connect readers and authors across the globe.

The evolution of the book • Julie Dreyfuss

The enduring appeal of novels lies in their ability to adapt and evolve with the changing times, reflecting the diverse nature of human experiences. From classic literary masterpieces to innovative modern narratives, novels continue to captivate readers by pushing the boundaries of storytelling, embracing diverse voices, and harnessing the power of technology.

As we delve deeper into the characteristics and unique aspects of this beloved literary form, we gain a greater appreciation for the profound impact novels have on our lives, culture, and society, enriching our understanding of the world around us.

What is Prose?

Now that we have explored the world of novels and their impact on society, it's time to delve deeper into the fundamental building block of these literary works: prose. In the following article, we will examine the characteristics and various forms of this essential writing style.

Up Next: What is Prose? →

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Blog • Perfecting your Craft

Posted on Jun 30, 2023

How to Write a Biography: A 7-Step Guide [+Template]

About the author.

Reedsy's editorial team is a diverse group of industry experts devoted to helping authors write and publish beautiful books.

About Dario Villirilli

Editor-in-Chief of the Reedsy blog, Dario is a graduate of Mälardalen University. As a freelance writer, he has written for many esteemed outlets aimed at writers. A traveler at heart, he can be found roaming the world and working from his laptop.

From time to time, nonfiction authors become so captivated by a particular figure from either the present or the past, that they feel compelled to write an entire book about their life. Whether casting them as heroes or villains, there is an interesting quality in their humanity that compels these authors to revisit their life paths and write their story.

However, portraying someone’s life on paper in a comprehensive and engaging way requires solid preparation. If you’re looking to write a biography yourself, in this post we’ll share a step-by-step blueprint that you can follow.

How to write a biography:

1. Seek permission when possible

2. research your subject thoroughly, 3. do interviews and visit locations, 4. organize your findings, 5. identify a central thesis, 6. write it using narrative elements, 7. get feedback and polish the text.

FREE RESOURCE

Biography Outline Template

Craft a satisfying story arc for your biography with our free template.

While you technically don’t need permission to write about public figures (or deceased ones), that doesn't guarantee their legal team won't pursue legal action against you. Author Kitty Kelley was sued by Frank Sinatra before she even started to write His Way , a biography that paints Ol Blue Eyes in a controversial light. (Kelley ended up winning the lawsuit, however).

Whenever feasible, advise the subject’s representatives of your intentions. If all goes according to plan, you’ll get a green light to proceed, or potentially an offer to collaborate. It's a matter of common sense; if someone were to write a book about you, you would likely want to know about it well prior to publication. So, make a sincere effort to reach out to their PR staff to negotiate an agreement or at least a mutual understanding of the scope of your project.

At the same time, make sure that you still retain editorial control over the project, and not end up writing a puff piece that treats its protagonist like a saint or hero. No biography can ever be entirely objective, but you should always strive for a portrayal that closely aligns with facts and reality.

If you can’t get an answer from your subject, or you’re asked not to proceed forward, you can still accept the potential repercussions and write an unauthorized biography . The “rebellious act” of publishing without consent indeed makes for great marketing, though it’ll likely bring more headaches with it too.

✋ Please note that, like other nonfiction books, if you intend to release your biography with a publishing house , you can put together a book proposal to send to them before you even write the book. If they like it enough, they might pay you an advance to write it.

Book Proposal Template

Craft a professional pitch for your nonfiction book with our handy template.

Once you’ve settled (or not) the permission part, it’s time to dive deep into your character’s story.

Deep and thorough research skills are the cornerstone of every biographer worth their salt. To paint a vivid and accurate portrait of someone's life, you’ll have to gather qualitative information from a wide range of reliable sources.

Start with the information already available, from books on your subject to archival documents, then collect new ones firsthand by interviewing people or traveling to locations.

Browse the web and library archives

Illustration of a biographer going into research mode.

Put your researcher hat on and start consuming any piece on your subject you can find, from their Wikipedia page to news articles, interviews, TV and radio appearances, YouTube videos, podcasts, books, magazines, and any other media outlets they may have been featured in.

Establish a system to orderly collect the information you find 一 even seemingly insignificant details can prove valuable during the writing process, so be sure to save them.

Depending on their era, you may find most of the information readily available online, or you may need to search through university libraries for older references.

For his landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow spent untold hours at Columbia University’s library , reading through the Hamilton family papers, visiting the New York Historical Society, as well as interviewing the archivist of the New York Stock Exchange, and so on. The research process took years, but it certainly paid off. Chernow discovered that Hamilton created the first five securities originally traded on Wall Street. This finding, among others, revealed his significant contributions to shaping the current American financial and political systems, a legacy previously often overshadowed by other founding fathers. Today Alexander Hamilton is one of the best-selling biographies of all time, and it has become a cultural phenomenon with its own dedicated musical.

Besides reading documents about your subject, research can help you understand the world that your subject lived in.

Try to understand their time and social environment

Many biographies show how their protagonists have had a profound impact on society through their philosophical, artistic, or scientific contributions. But at the same time, it’s worth it as a biographer to make an effort to understand how their societal and historical context influenced their life’s path and work.

An interesting example is Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World . Finding himself limited by a lack of verified detail surrounding William Shakespeare's personal life, Greenblatt, instead, employs literary interpretation and imaginative reenactments to transport readers back to the Elizabethan era. The result is a vivid (though speculative) depiction of the playwright's life, enriching our understanding of his world.

Painting of William Shakespeare in colors

Many readers enjoy biographies that transport them to a time and place, so exploring a historical period through the lens of a character can be entertaining in its own right. The Diary of Samuel Pepys became a classic not because people were enthralled by his life as an administrator, but rather from his meticulous and vivid documentation of everyday existence during the Restoration period.

Once you’ve gotten your hands on as many secondary sources as you can find, you’ll want to go hunting for stories first-hand from people who are (or were) close to your subject.

With all the material you’ve been through, by now you should already have a pretty good picture of your protagonist. But you’ll surely have some curiosities and missing dots in their character development to figure out, which you can only get by interviewing primary sources.

Interview friends and associates

This part is more relevant if your subject is contemporary, and you can actually meet up or call with relatives, friends, colleagues, business partners, neighbors, or any other person related to them.

In writing the popular biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson interviewed more than one hundred people, including Jobs’s family, colleagues, former college mates, business rivals, and the man himself.

🔍 Read other biographies to get a sense of what makes a great one. Check out our list of the 30 best biographies of all time , or take our 30-second quiz below for tips on which one you should read next.

Which biography should you read next?

Discover the perfect biography for you. Takes 30 seconds!

When you conduct your interviews, make sure to record them with high quality audio you can revisit later. Then use tools like Otter.ai or Descript to transcribe them 一 it’ll save you countless hours.

You can approach the interview with a specific set of questions, or follow your curiosity blindly, trying to uncover revealing stories and anecdotes about your subject. Whatever your method, author and biography editor Tom Bromley suggests that every interviewer arrives prepared, "Show that you’ve done your work. This will help to put the interviewee at ease, and get their best answers.”

Bromley also places emphasis on the order in which you conduct interviews. “You may want to interview different members of the family or friends first, to get their perspective on something, and then go directly to the main interviewee. You'll be able to use that knowledge to ask sharper, more specific questions.”

Finally, consider how much time you have with each interviewee. If you only have a 30-minute phone call with an important person, make it count by asking directly the most pressing questions you have. And, if you find a reliable source who is also particularly willing to help, conduct several interviews and ask them, if appropriate, to write a foreword as part of the book’s front matter .

Sometimes an important part of the process is packing your bags, getting on a plane, and personally visiting significant places in your character’s journey.

Visit significant places in their life

A place, whether that’s a city, a rural house, or a bodhi tree, can carry a particular energy that you can only truly experience by being there. In putting the pieces together about someone’s life, it may be useful to go visit where they grew up, or where other significant events of their lives happened. It will be easier to imagine what they experienced, and better tell their story.

In researching The Lost City of Z , author David Grann embarked on a trek through the Amazon, retracing the steps of British explorer Percy Fawcett. This led Grann to develop new theories about the circumstances surrounding the explorer's disappearance.

Still from the movie The Lost City of Z in which the explorer is surrounded by an Amazon native tribe

Hopefully, you won’t have to deal with jaguars and anacondas to better understand your subject’s environment, but try to walk into their shoes as much as possible.

Once you’ve researched your character enough, it’s time to put together all the puzzle pieces you collected so far.

Take the bulk of notes, media, and other documents you’ve collected, and start to give them some order and structure. A simple way to do this is by creating a timeline.

Create a chronological timeline

It helps to organize your notes chronologically 一 from childhood to the senior years, line up the most significant events of your subject’s life, including dates, places, names and other relevant bits.

You should be able to divide their life into distinct periods, each with their unique events and significance. Based on that, you can start drafting an outline of the narrative you want to create.

Draft a story outline

Since a biography entails writing about a person’s entire life, it will have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You can pick where you want to end the story, depending on how consequential the last years of your subject were. But the nature of the work will give you a starting character arc to work with.

To outline the story then, you could turn to the popular Three-Act Structure , which divides the narrative in three main parts. In a nutshell, you’ll want to make sure to have the following:

Act 1. Setup : Introduce the protagonist's background and the turning points that set them on a path to achieve a goal.
Act 2. Confrontation : Describe the challenges they encounter, both internal and external, and how they rise to them. Then..
Act 3. Resolution : Reach a climactic point in their story in which they succeed (or fail), showing how they (and the world around them) have changed as a result.

Only one question remains before you begin writing: what will be the main focus of your biography?

Think about why you’re so drawn to your subject to dedicate years of your life to recounting their own. What aspect of their life do you want to highlight? Is it their evil nature, artistic genius, or visionary mindset? And what evidence have you got to back that up? Find a central thesis or focus to weave as the main thread throughout your narrative.

Cover of Hitler and Stalin by Alan Bullock

Or find a unique angle

If you don’t have a particular theme to explore, finding a distinct angle on your subject’s story can also help you distinguish your work from other biographies or existing works on the same subject.

Plenty of biographies have been published about The Beatles 一 many of which have different focuses and approaches:

Philip Norman's Shout is sometimes regarded as leaning more towards a pro-Lennon and anti-McCartney stance, offering insights into the band's inner dynamics.
Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head closely examines their music track by track, shifting the focus back to McCartney as a primary creative force.
Craig Brown's One Two Three Four aims to capture their story through anecdotes, fan letters, diary entries, and interviews.
Mark Lewisohn's monumental three-volume biography, Tune In , stands as a testament to over a decade of meticulous research, chronicling every intricate detail of the Beatles' journey.

Finally, consider that biographies are often more than recounting the life of a person. Similar to how Dickens’ Great Expectations is not solely about a boy named Pip (but an examination and critique of Britain’s fickle, unforgiving class system), a biography should strive to illuminate a broader truth — be it social, political, or human — beyond the immediate subject of the book.

Once you’ve identified your main focus or angle, it’s time to write a great story.

Illustration of a writer mixing storytelling ingredients

While biographies are often highly informative, they do not have to be dry and purely expository in nature . You can play with storytelling elements to make it an engaging read.

You could do that by thoroughly detailing the setting of the story , depicting the people involved in the story as fully-fledged characters , or using rising action and building to a climax when describing a particularly significant milestone of the subject’s life.

One common way to make a biography interesting to read is starting on a strong foot…

Hook the reader from the start

Just because you're honoring your character's whole life doesn't mean you have to begin when they said their first word. Starting from the middle or end of their life can be more captivating as it introduces conflicts and stakes that shaped their journey.

When he wrote about Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild , author Jon Krakauer didn’t open his subject’s childhood and abusive family environment. Instead, the book begins with McCandless hitchhiking his way into the wilderness, and subsequently being discovered dead in an abandoned bus. By starting in the middle of the action in medias res, Krakauer hooks the reader’s interest, before tracing back the causes and motivations that led McCandless to die alone in that bus in the first place.

Chris McCandless self-portrait in front of the now iconic bus

You can bend the timeline to improve the reader’s reading experience throughout the rest of the story too…

Play with flashback

While biographies tend to follow a chronological narrative, you can use flashbacks to tell brief stories or anecdotes when appropriate. For example, if you were telling the story of footballer Lionel Messi, before the climax of winning the World Cup with Argentina, you could recall when he was just 13 years old, giving an interview to a local newspaper, expressing his lifelong dream of playing for the national team.

Used sparsely and intentionally, flashbacks can add more context to the story and keep the narrative interesting. Just like including dialogue does…

Reimagine conversations

Recreating conversations that your subject had with people around them is another effective way to color the story. Dialogue helps the reader imagine the story like a movie, providing a deeper sensory experience.

One thing is trying to articulate the root of Steve Jobs’ obsession with product design, another would be to quote his father , teaching him how to build a fence when he was young: “You've got to make the back of the fence just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know. And that will show that you're dedicated to making something perfect.”

Unlike memoirs and autobiographies, in which the author tells the story from their personal viewpoint and enjoys greater freedom to recall conversations, biographies require a commitment to facts. So, when recreating dialogue, try to quote directly from reliable sources like personal diaries, emails, and text messages. You could also use your interview scripts as an alternative to dialogue. As Tom Bromley suggests, “If you talk with a good amount of people, you can try to tell the story from their perspective, interweaving different segments and quoting the interviewees directly.”

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These are just some of the story elements you can use to make your biography more compelling. Once you’ve finished your manuscript, it’s a good idea to ask for feedback.

If you’re going to publish your own biography, you’ll have to polish it to professional standards. After leaving your work to rest for a while, look at it with fresh eyes and edit your own manuscript eliminating passive voice, filler words, and redundant adverbs.

Illustration of an editor reviewing a manuscript

Then, have a professional editor give you a general assessment. They’ll look at the structure and shape of your manuscript and tell you which parts need to be expanded on or cut. As someone who edited and commissioned several biographies, Tom Bromley points out that a professional “will look at the sources used and assess whether they back up the points made, or if more are needed. They would also look for context, and whether or not more background information is needed for the reader to understand the story fully. And they might check your facts, too.”

In addition to structural editing, you may want to have someone copy-edit and proofread your work.

MEET EDITORS

Polish your book with expert help

Importantly, make sure to include a bibliography with a list of all the interviews, documents, and sources used in the writing process. You’ll have to compile it according to a manual of style, but you can easily create one by using tools like EasyBib . Once the text is nicely polished and typeset in your writing applications , you can prepare for the publication process.

In conclusion, by mixing storytelling elements with diligent research, you’ll be able to breathe life into a powerful biography that immerses readers in another individual’s life experience. Whether that’ll spark inspiration or controversy, remember you could have an important role in shaping their legacy 一 and that’s something not to take lightly.

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Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s life work celebrating Judaism summed up in new book

It is the book that you need to read right now. it will change your view of judaism and of the world itself..

(RNS) — Rabbi Yitz Greenberg is my oldest rabbi friend.

First, this modern Orthodox rabbi was one of the first rabbis to really touch my life and to engage me in what my Protestant colleagues would call “formation.”

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg was a congregational rabbi in Riverdale, New York, the founder of the Jewish studies program at City College of New York and the creator of the Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL), a think tank for Jewish pluralism and intra-Jewish conversation.

I first met Rabbi Greenberg and his wife, Blu Greenberg, the major Jewish feminist leader, when he engaged me to work with a bunch of modern Orthodox teenagers on a CLAL retreat.

That encounter with Rabbi Greenberg, whom I would come to know as Yitz or Rabbi Yitz, changed my perception of Orthodox Jews and Orthodox Judaism. It made me more open to seeing the Jews as a unified people and not just a discrete collection of ideologies.

Rabbi Irving ‘Yitz’ Greenberg. (Courtesy photo)

Yes: This Orthodox rabbi helped shape the world view of this Reform rabbi. His vision of an observant Judaism that was open to the world, and freely encountered the world, moved me — so much so, that decades later, I would become a regular participant in the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, founded by Rabbi Greenberg’s colleague, the late Rabbi David Hartman — also an Orthodox rabbi and, like Yitz, also a rebel.

The second way in which Rav Yitz is my oldest friend in the rabbinate: He is 91 years old, and he has just published his magnum opus, his master work, the culmination of everything that he has taught for so long — “The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism.”

This is the book that Yitz’s students — and frankly, the Jewish world — have been waiting for for more than a half century.

Yitz’s central idea: Judaism is a religion of life, that centers on life, in which every commandment affirms life and moves the human being toward higher affirmations of life and, ultimately, toward God.

The essence of the commandments is for us to live through them. When there is a choice between life/health and a religious duty, the Jew must set aside almost any religious duty in order to save life.

Yitz writes:

God wants the forces of order and life to win out. God asks humans to live in such a way that in their actions, they join in on the side of order and against chaos, on the side of life and against nonlife and death, on the side of increasing quality of life and against dumbing it down.

The meaning of the covenant between God and the Jewish people is that we might repair the world — tikkun olam — to perfect the world and to bring it closer to God’s ultimate vision of human perfection. At every stage of Jewish life, we are called upon to see our actions, and the arenas in which we play them out, as microcosms of that perfect world.

The Torah works with microcosms, inner circles that may be expanded. The (ancient) Temple is the microcosm for space; Shabbat is the inner circle for time; the Jewish people is the inner circle for humanity. In time the inner circles will expand and include all those in the outer circle. Thus holy space will encompass Jerusalem, then Israel, and eventually the whole world. Shabbat will grow until the whole week is the zone of full life. The holy people will expand until all of humanity are holy people.

For Yitz, what teaching forms the moral core of Judaism? “The great principle underlying the ethic of the Torah is that every human being — regardless of gender, race, skin color, nationality, or religion — is created in the image of God, and endowed accordingly with three fundamental dignities: infinite value, equality, and uniqueness.”

Infinite value and infinite worth. In the movie “ The Monuments Men ,” a team goes into Europe during World War II to find and save valuable pieces of art that the Nazis had stolen and threatened to destroy. I liked the movie; I greatly disliked the story. People worked admirably to save works of art; they labored far less admirably to save the real works of art — God’s children, God’s creations.

In Yitz’s words:

What is the value of an image of a human being?—that is, of a work of art created by a classic artist? Multiple Picassos have sold for over $100 million … In 1990 the world record for a painting at that time was set when one by Van Gogh — itself literally an image of a man, the Portrait of Dr. Gachet — was sold for $82.5 million to a Japanese insurance company.

This is precisely what formed Rav Yitz’s lifelong involvement in Holocaust remembrance. (He was one of the founders of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum .) The Nazis incinerated Jewish children alive in order to economize on the cost of gas. The Holocaust was a unique assault on the divine image. Therefore, anything and everything that we can do to uphold the divine image is sacred work.

Upholding the divine image — that is our task — even as the divine seems to fade. In one of his most profound moves, Rabbi Yitz demarcates three eras in Jewish history — the biblical, the rabbinic and the modern. In each era, the presence of God changes. God is no longer manifest, as God was in biblical times; God withdraws into the divine self to allow greater human activism.

God is now totally hidden in natural laws and material processes. Today, God makes more miracles than ever, but only through human agency — our unlocking the miraculous powers in physical and biological matter that only we can exercise by understanding and utilizing nature’s laws.

Once upon a time, people lived lives of faith, sometimes interrupted by moments of doubt. Today, people live lives of doubt, sometimes interrupted by moments of faith.

“The Triumph of Life” is simply that — a triumph of the Jewish mind and spirit. It is a remarkable tribute to the life work of one of contemporary Judaism’s most treasured and cherished voices. That it emerges when he is 91 years old is itself a blessing — first, that he had the blessing to see his work come to light, and second, that, in the words of Deuteronomy in describing the elderly Moses, “his eye is undimmed” and his spirit as strong today as it was decades ago.

“The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism” by Rabbi Irving Greenberg. (Courtesy image)

More than that: My friendship with Yitz and Blu has enriched my life immeasurably. Their hospitality to me, with the accompanying conversations about the challenges of modernity, and how our respective Judaisms confront those challenges, have become the true highlight of my July sojourns in Jerusalem.

Years ago, he said something that has always stayed with me — the job description of the Jews, in three Ps:

The Jews are pedagogues — teaching the idea of the infinite value, equality and uniqueness of every human being — even and especially in times and places when this idea would have been considered absurd.

The Jews are paradigms — a working model to show how we can perfect the world. A working model is not perfect, but nevertheless, the Jews can still be a model.

The Jews are partners — working with those of other faiths and even no faith in perfecting the world. It is only now, in a time of increased religious dialogue, that such a partnership is even thinkable.

One last thing.

It is not only that Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, at 91, is my oldest friend in the rabbinate (or anywhere else, for that matter).

It is far more than that.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg is the last of his generation of Jewish thinkers.

I think of those from whom we have learned and who have died: Eugene Borowitz , Leonard “Leibel” Fein, David Hartman, Jacob Neusner , Richard Rubenstein , Harold Schulweis , Steven Schwarzchild , Elie Wiesel , Michael Wyschogrod . The list goes on and on.

No women? Actually, there are two — and both of them are still quite alive. There is Cynthia Ozick , 96 years old — novelist, literary critic and Jewish thinker. And there is, of course, Blu Greenberg, whose vision of Jewish feminism created and nurtured a generation of Jewish feminist thinkers.

But, that list of thinkers … All of them, born between 1924 and 1934. All of them, now studying together and arguing loudly and vociferously at a table in the world to come.

Only Yitz is still here.

Let’s keep it that way. Yitz Greenberg is the living witness to the words of the Psalmist: Do not cast us off into old age.

Until 120. Please.

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A women lies in dry grass with her eyes closed.

Opera Eucalyptus is a lush adaptation of Murray Bail’s novel – with a modern twist

Adjunct Lecturer, Southern Cross University

Disclosure statement

Moya Costello does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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My first curiosities about the new opera Eucalyptus, an adaptation of Murray Bail’s multi-award-winning 1998 novel , were regarding how Ellen and the many stories told to her by her ultimately successful suitor would be portrayed.

Would Ellen be a victim of the plans of men, or would she forge her own path, as she does in the novel? Overall, I was relieved the opera remained largely faithful to Bail’s novel by recognising and respecting its various narrative pleasures.

Bail’s story centres on our protagonist, the famously beautiful Ellen (played by Desiree Frahn) and a eucalypt gum-naming competition set up by her father, Holland (Simon Meadows), to find her the perfect suitor. To Holland, little is more precious than his daughter and the hundreds of eucalyptus gums he has planted on his property. But Ellen vehemently rejects his plans for her.

The “storyteller” (Michael Petrucelli) is the unnamed wanderer Ellen stumbles upon in her father’s woods. He wins Ellen’s hand in marriage by naming all the gums (and does so inadvertently by creating name plaques which he then sells to Ellen’s father). Beyond this, he seduces Ellen with various tales of love, loss, death and deception.

Bail’s story comes to life

While Bail’s original story takes place at an unspecified time on “a property in western New South Wales”, director Michael Gow’s program notes a setting in the early 1960s.

The gums in the story are projected as images onstage, accompanied by characters and choristers (Brisbane Chorus) singing the eucalypts’ Latin names. The choristers also play the roles of Ellen’s many suitors.

The opera is composed by Jonathan Mills, conducted by Tahu Matheson and accompanied by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. The first orchestration – in which Holland makes clear his questionable intentions for his daughter, leaving her in distress – appropriately strikes a sombre, discordant note.

Central to Bail’s story is a kind of anachronistic Anglo-Saxon Australian man (represented in various male characters across Bail’s fiction) who doesn’t understand women, and who deals in what he thinks of as facts and empiricisms, such as the (non-Indigenous) names of the gums.

Ellen, meanwhile, is seduced by art, nature, the imaginative and the propulsion of storytelling.

And although she finds herself in this unseemly transaction initiated by her father, living somewhat like a captured fairytale figure, Ellen still has agency: she roams freely, responds to nature, learns, thinks, judges, deduces and decides.

I’ve often thought Ellen’s character is partly based on Bail’s former wife, Helen Garner, who unravelled in the wake of her failed second marriage and the reception of her book-length essay, The First Stone .

Though many women are antipathetic to Bail’s general portrayal of women, academic Lyn Jacobs notes “a new sensitivity to the dynamics of gender” in Eucalyptus.

The opera’s ensemble cast is energetically committed to the subtleties of characterisation. Frahn expertly captured Ellen’s sense of wonder. Similarly, Meadows convincingly captures Holland’s pathos: “I don’t want you riding their bikes, I don’t want you smoking their Lucky Strikes.”

Michael Petruccelli performs passionately as the storyteller, startlingly engaging both Ellen and the audience. And Mr Cave (Samuel Dundas), who at one point looks frighteningly close to becoming Ellen’s successful suitor, is more pompous, priggish and comedic in a white safari suit than his novel counterpart, who instead is a machine-like and almost stalker-ish figure.

Some noticeable points of difference

Gow’s direction is faultless in the first half of the production, but some minor issues discombobulated me in the second half, as I am unwilling to completely suspend belief when it came to Simone Romaniuk’s set design.

One example is when Ellen, the storyteller, Holland and Mr Cave all end up sitting among the choristers’ chairs, while these could have easily been removed in exchange for props used as rocks.

At one point, the storyteller also sits on the table in the house, whereas in the novel he (significantly) only enters the house once – to lay chastely with Ellen on her bed.

That said, I was pleased to see Ellen clothed by Romaniuk in a simple slip of a dress “faded to butter colour”, as described in the novel. Bail’s women characters often wear faded colours, or rhubarb and green. Holland, meanwhile, is in functional rather than sartorial braces.

Meredith Oakes’ lyrically inventive and funny libretto falters at the end, recalling too much of a cheesy HBO romance film. The word “love” features heavily, when the optimal word is more relevantly “desire”, as per the original story.

The end of the opera in particular takes a noticeable departure from the original tale, in which Ellen’s desire for the storyteller is fundamental to the narrative. In the opera, however, she seems determinedly to take up her own, different destiny.

Many in the audience will possibly appreciate this resurgence of female agency.

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In Rachel Kushner’s New Novel, a Spy Infiltrates the Left

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In Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel, Creation Lake , a world-weary spy infiltrates a leftist commune. Hoping to entrap its leaders, she ends up being consumed by the strain of living a double life.

Novelist Rachel Kushner in Los Angeles, California, on April 2, 2013. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

In the late 1970s, Michael Bettaney, a fascist sympathizer who made the familiar British journey from Oxford to MI5, was pulled over. Drunk and out of sorts, he is reported to have told officers: “You can’t arrest me, I’m a spy.” Drunkenness and antisemitism made Bettaney especially qualified for the intelligence service. He rose within its ranks even after his sudden conversion to communism; after evangelizing about its virtues to his colleagues, he was promptly promoted to the Soviet desk. It was only pilfering government documents to send to the other side that eventually got him the sack.

The protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel, Creation Lake , is free of the ideological confusions that plagued Bettaney. Sadie Smith, our hero’s alias, was at the center of a plot to entrap a young man from an activist grouplet with promises of romance. Thrown under the bus by the FBI, Sadie works as a spy for hire, sleuthing leftist groups across Europe.

In her attention to history and politics, Kushner reprises themes found in her earlier work. Telex from Cuba (2008), her debut, was set in Oriente Province in the lead-up to the revolution. Granular in its focus on the country’s social classes, history, and dramatis personae, Kushner’s novel sprung out of an ethos that continues to underly her subsequent work: in her novels, equal attention is paid to the political and aesthetic dimensions of human experience. She followed Telex from Cuba with The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018), books whose subjects were Italy’s red years and mass incarceration from the vantage point of a woman’s prison in the United States.

Creation Lake follows Sadie, a spy who succeeds in infiltrating French eco-leftists. To gain entry into the group, she seduces Lucien, a filmmaker, gaining access to his childhood friend, Pascal, the head the Moulinards, a Guy Debord–inspired commune. Its members are naive Parisians who have chosen for the site of their community a place without irrigation. “Only activists from Paris would take up subsistence farming in a place like this,” Sadie scoffs. Her handler’s hope is that she’ll get Pascal to commit some nefarious act, ideally attacking or possibly killing the unpopular minister for Rural Coherence, a man named Paul Platon.

When we encounter Sadie, it is unclear whether she is down on her luck or doing marvelously well. She insists on the latter but the underlying threat that the former might actually be the case looms large. “Charisma,” she declares a few pages in, “comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.” It is this need that she manipulates in Lucien and then Pascal, both of whom are seduced by a mystique they have projected onto her. Charisma — understood as a willingness to allow people to see whatever they want in you — is a quality she has in abundance.

Two narrative tracks run parallel in Creation Lake . In one, we follow, nonchronologically, Sadie’s move from the United States to France and her attempt to infiltrate and subvert the activist group. The other consists of the long emails of a philosopher-sage figure named Bruno Lacombe who I imagined throughout as Murray Bookchin.

Initially, Lacombe comes across as a bore, speculating wildly about whether Neanderthals — he affectionately calls them Thals — had depression or art. But his rants are compelling, partly because they showcase his curiosity — a counter to Sadie’s own nihilism. Living in an underground cave, he speculates that the surface and the sky are the terrain of fighter jets and war, that real thinking is to be found in the subterranean depths. Lacombe becomes an anchor for Sadie, who reads his emails even after the activists have lost interest in the wisdom they contain.

Sadie’s seductive charisma drives the second narrative line in which she uses her feminine wiles to gain entry into the commune. Men, in Sadie’s view, very often mistake approving nods and intonations of “that’s interesting” for conversation. Recognizing this, Sadie softens suspicions by appealing to the desires of the men around her. “They want you to talk to them about their precious youth,” she observes in one of her contempt-fueled monologues.

Lucien is completely unaware of the low esteem in which Sadie holds him. This provides the novel with some of its most biting observations.

In Marseille, as we lay in the hotel bed, my back to him, pretending I was asleep, he said into my hair. “When I’m inside you it’s like I’m home.” I shivered in disgust. Sensing my shiver as if it were a tremble of love, he squeezed me and whispered, “Sadie.”

Everything about this set piece is brutal. The dynamic between the two characters is caught entirely in the image of a man speaking to a woman’s hair — her ears closed to what he is saying — and equating sexual intimacy with the idea of home, from which the woman has gone all the way to Europe to run away. That the name he calls her is not her own makes the interaction even more cutting.

In moments like this, Sadie’s attempts to position herself as a negative space against which the foibles and hypocrisies of her targets are illuminated also puts her in stark relief. Within Kushner’s spy caper, a microdrama of personal breakdown in which a woman desperately attempts to avoid asking any questions of her life quietly plays out. Much like the private dicks of Raymond Chandler or Ross Macdonald, Sadie is psychologically opaque, sardonic, and unidealistic. Nevertheless, she does seem to desire a life of excitement, free from the humdrum rhythms of work and family.

Watching a documentary in which a nine-year-old Italian boy speaks to the camera with the machismo of a grown man about “making love” to an age-mate, Sadie wonders what life he could be living now. The boy’s precociousness must, Sadie speculates, have set him up for a life of extremes. Had he been killed in a bank robbery? Or perhaps become the kind of leftist activist she gets paid to hunt down and entrap? Scouring the internet, Sadie discovers something altogether more terrifying: a provincial small life, unremarkable in every sense. “Franck,” the boy, “had thirty-one Facebook friends. His interests and hobbies included Nescafé, Burger King, and a Facebook group called I Love My Daughter. Adulthood had sanded him into someone profoundly unremarkable. . . . Grown-up Franck is driving an Amazon delivery van right now, in his Lamborghini baseball cap.”

A settled life and domesticity of any kind are evoked as objects entirely repellent to the narrator. Sadie’s recurring fantasy, her “sole fantasy of motherhood,” repeated throughout the novel and in its final pages, is that she might raise a child that she found in a dumpster. But this child would never become a real person and would instead remain in “blurry focus.” A real child might run the risk of growing up to be a mediocrity like Franck or a dupe like Lucien, we’re led to wonder.

For Sadie, a person’s core — what she calls “salt” in late-night alcohol-fueled monologues — is unchangeable; it provides the underlying motivations for all their actions. This predisposes her to a deep suspicion of the leftist activists she has infiltrated. For them, constructing a new community is a way of creating a new form of life, transforming the soul as a precondition for transforming the world. But the real motivations for human action are “not politics. There are no politics inside of people,” only salts — deep desires that latch onto political movements and empty cyphers like herself.

Midway through Creation Lake , Sadie mocks Fredric Jameson’s dictum, repeated to the point of meaninglessness, that it’s “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” That something is hard to imagine “does not mean it is correct,” Sadie insists. It is more likely evidence that “capitalism might be more insidious than the blue-green miracle of planet earth and its swaddling of life-giving ether.” This possibility — that progress has been defeated, that hope is lost — is one that the leftists Sadie shadows are unable to countenance.

Only Lacombe, holed up in his cave, having abandoned the world, is capable of looking clear-eyed at the present. This is a quality Sadie respects, and the voice of Lacombe — sensitive and curious about the world despite defeat — is the novel’s most authoritative. Between the bitterness and airy speculation of the Moulinards and the bleakness of Sadie’s outlook, the pull of Lacombe’s worldview becomes ever more alluring.

At first this idea struck me as lonely and hopeless. But maybe it is only by admitting that some harmful condition is permanent, that you begin to locate a way to escape it.

In the final act of the novel, Sadie narrates her own pyrrhic victory. Believing she has convinced the most credulous of the Moulinards to engage in an act of domestic terrorism, Sadie shows up with several guns she hopes to distribute at a protest scheduled to coincide with the appearance of Platon. Handing a gun to Burdmoore, a monolingual American living with the Moulinards, she encounters skepticism rather than compliance:

Burdmoore: “You want me to use this thing? On this guy Paul Platon?” Something was off. . . Burdmoore: “Do you think I left my brain in a trash can someplace?” Sadie: “What?” Burdmoore: “Do you think I’m seriously going to run at this guy, in front of all these people, with cops bearing down, and fucking shoot him? Are you nuts?” Burdmoore: “I’ll keep it as a souvenir. It’ll remind me of that time some crazy chick came to Le Moulin and tried to stir up a bunch of shit and no one went for it.”

Platon’s death, when it does take place, is entirely an accident; the only role Sadie plays in his demise is as witness. Charm, charisma, and its seductive powers prove in Creation Lake ’s final act to be impotent. What makes Sadie so ineffective is unclear, although the increase in the rate at which she is drinking and her growing carelessness in the novel’s final act suggest that we are not witnessing her at the height of her powers.

Initially, Sadie’s strength comes from her ability to tap into the desires of her marks. But that relies on an asymmetry: they project their desires onto her, and she molds herself into an object capable of fulfilling their fantasies. But as Sadie’s handlers offer her greater sums of money for more daring espionage, her desperation leads her to show her hand. Lured by cash, she becomes as pathetic as her victims.

Melania Trump’s Memoir: Release Date and More Details on Upcoming Book

The former first lady promoted her memoir, saying, "I feel a responsibility to clarify the facts."

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN - JULY 18: Former first lady Melania Trump arrives on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 18, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Delegates, politicians, and the Republican faithful are in Milwaukee for the annual convention, concluding with former President Donald Trump accepting his party's presidential nomination. The RNC takes place from July 15-18. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Melania Trump , the former First Lady of the United States, is set to release her highly anticipated memoir, offering a rare glimpse into her life in the White House and more.

“As a private person who has often been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation, I feel a responsibility to clarify the facts,” the 54-year-old former model said in a video posted to her X account on Thursday.

“I believe it is important to share my perspective — the truth,” Melania added.

Donald Trump ‘s campaign advisers and sources close to the couple have said that Melania — who married the former president in 2005 — is supportive of him and his political ambitions. They added that she is very selective about her political appearances and has been focused on raising their son, Barron .

In promotional materials, Skyhorse Publishing described the book as an “intimate portrait of a woman who has lived an extraordinary life.” The memoir is expected to include “stories and images never before shared with the public,” according to the publisher.

Here’s everything you need to know about the upcoming memoir.

What Will the Memoir Cover?

Melania’s office announced last month that her memoir, Melania , would be released this fall, describing it as “a powerful and inspiring story of a woman who has carved her own path, overcome adversity, and defined personal excellence.”

According to the publisher, the book will include reflections on her childhood in Slovenia, a “chance encounter” with her husband that “forever changed the course of her life,” and “behind-the-scenes” stories from her time in the White House during Trump’s controversial presidency.

“ Melania offers an unprecedented look into her time as a First Lady who was born outside the United States — a role she embraced with honor and dedication. It brings readers into her world and presents an in-depth account of a woman who has led a remarkable life on her own terms. Melania Trump’s story is one of resilience and independence, showcasing her strength and unwavering commitment to her true self.”

My Story. My Perspective. The Truth. https://t.co/ZCTwZSqZND pic.twitter.com/HHGQaA6d5v — MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) September 5, 2024

When Will the Memoir Be Released?

According to the publisher’s site, the book is set for release on Oct. 8, strategically timed for the final weeks of the current campaign cycle as Trump seeks re-election in a face-off with Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris .

Trump provided a blurb for his wife’s book, writing, “Melania is my rock and foundation, and I wouldn’t be the man I am today without her by my side.”

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In anticipation of ‘wicked’ film, the novel that inspired it gets a collector’s edition re-release.

How to pre-order a limited-edition copy of Gregory Maguire's novel (with a 30 percent discount).

By Erin Lassner

Erin Lassner

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'Lord of the Rings' Collector’s Edition Box Set

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If you’re counting down the days until Wicked ‘s November 22 release , consider reading the book that inspired the story.

‘Wicked’ Collector’s Edition by Gregory Maguire

The deluxe hardcover edition features emerald green stained edges, a black ribbon marker, an elegant foil-stamped case and Oz map endpapers. If you order now, it will be delivered on or shortly after Sept. 24.

Along with Wicked ‘s collector’s edition copy, the retailer is home to a Target-exclusive Lord of the Rings Collector’s Edition Box Set , also available for pre-order now, with an official release date of Oct. 1, 2024.

‘Lord of the Rings’ Collector’s Edition Box Set

The set includes hardcover re-editions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring , The Two Towers and The Return of the King with new cover designs, foil stamping, stained edges and ribbon bookmarks, plus a collectible fold-out map of Middle-earth, available exclusively at Target for a limited time, and retailing for $84.

Related: A Novelization of ‘Wednesday’ Season One Just Dropped: Here’s How to Score the Limited-Edition Collectible Version

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IMAGES

The Story of a Novel (Annotated): incl. biography of Thomas Wolfe
‘Novel: A Biography’ captures life, history connections of literature
When a Novelist Writes a Biography
Biography vs Autobiography: Similarities and Differences (2024)
William Shakespeare; A Biography by Rowse, A. L.: (1963) First edition
Difference Between Novel and Novella

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COMMENTS

Biographical novel
The biographical novel is a genre of novel which provides a fictional account of a contemporary or historical person's life. Like other forms of biographical fiction, details are often trimmed or reimagined to meet the artistic needs of the fictional genre, the novel. These reimagined biographies are sometimes called semi-biographical novels ...
Memoir vs Autobiography vs Biography: Differences
A biography is a novel written about someone's entire life, typically in chronological order, written by someone other than the subject. The topic of a biography will often be someone who is an important historical figure, a celebrity, or a person who has had significant cultural or societal impact.
Biography
autobiography. hagiography. memoir. Costa Book Awards. character writer. biography, form of literature, commonly considered nonfictional, the subject of which is the life of an individual. One of the oldest forms of literary expression, it seeks to re-create in words the life of a human being—as understood from the historical or personal ...
Biography
Biography, autobiography, and memoir are the three main forms used to tell the story of a person's life. Though there are similarities between these forms, they have distinct differences in terms of the writing, style, and purpose. A biography is an informational narrative and account of the life history of an individual person, written by someone who is not the subject of the biography.
Novel
The novel is a genre of fiction, and fiction may be defined as the art or craft of contriving, through the written word, representations of human life that instruct or divert or both.The various forms that fiction may take are best seen less as a number of separate categories than as a continuum or, more accurately, a cline, with some such brief form as the anecdote at one end of the scale and ...
What is a Biography? Definition, Elements, and More
A biography is what we call the written account of someone's life. It is written by someone other than whom the book is about. For example, an author named Walter Isaacson has written biographies on Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, and Einstein. A biography is what focuses on the significant events that occurred in a person's life, along with ...
Biography in Literature: Definition & Examples
A biography (BYE-og-ruh-fee) is a written account of one person's life authored by another person. A biography includes all pertinent details from the subject's life, typically arranged in a chronological order. The word biography stems from the Latin biographia, which succinctly explains the word's definition: bios = "life" + graphia = "write."
How the Novel Made the Modern World
The book is a biography in that sense, too: the lives of the novelists. Schmidt understands that novels are written for readers—not "ideal" readers, not readers in the abstract, but actual ...
The Components of an Intriguing Biography
Richard Nordquist. Updated on May 30, 2019. A biography is a story of a person's life, written by another author. The writer of a biography is called a biographer while the person written about is known as the subject or biographee. Biographies usually take the form of a narrative, proceeding chronologically through the stages of a person's life.
The Novel
The Novel: A Biography is a marvel of sustained attention, responsiveness, tolerance and intelligence… It is Schmidt's triumph that one reads on and on without being bored or annoyed by his keen generosity. Any young person hot for literature would be wise to take this fat, though never obese, volume as an all-in-one course in how and what to read.
The 33 Best Biographical Fiction Novels for Historical Fiction Lovers
Excuse me while I gush about Gill Paul's newest biographical fiction book, Jackie and Maria.⁣ Gill Paul is quickly becoming an auto-buy author for me. I loved Another Woman's Husband and The Lost Daughter, about the Windsors and Romanovs respectively. Paul's take on a new dynasty, The Kennedys, is equally compelling.⁣.
Biography in literature
Literary biography. A literary biography is the biographical exploration of individuals' lives merging historical facts with the conventions of narrative. [1] Biographies about artists and writers are sometimes some of the most complicated forms of biography. [2] Not only does the author of the biography have to write about the subject of the ...
Biography
A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. ... The book was an account of the life of the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Following Malory, ...
The 30 Best Biographies of All Time
12. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann. Another mysterious explorer takes center stage in this gripping 2009 biography. Grann tells the story of Percy Fawcett, the archaeologist who vanished in the Amazon along with his son in 1925, supposedly in search of an ancient lost city.
Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction
Implicit in Bode's article are the two following assumptions: first, the biography gives readers "unadorned truth" (266), and, second, what qualifies a work as a novel is the introduction of an embellished truth or "an orderly, almost a symphonic, structure and a literary richness of style" (266). Accordingly, if a biography contains an ...
What Is a Novel? Definition and Characteristics
A novel is a narrative work of prose fiction that tells a story about specific human or character experiences over a considerable length. Prose style and length, as well as fictional or semi-fictional subject matter, are the most clearly defining characteristics of a novel. Unlike works of epic poetry, it tells its story using prose rather than ...
What Is a Biography?
A biography is simply the story of a real person's life. It could be about a person who is still alive, someone who lived centuries ago, someone who is globally famous, an unsung hero forgotten by history, or even a unique group of people. The facts of their life, from birth to death (or the present day of the author), are included with life ...
How to Write a Biography: A Step-by-Step Guide
A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Biography. As with writing any book, writing a biography is a marathon, not a sprint. It's easier to think of it as a series of smaller steps than as one big challenge to tackle. Let's break down the process step by step. 1. Choose Your Subject. Decide who you want to write about.
Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction
The biographical. ". novel is, first and foremost, fiction, which is why Jay Parini insists in the acknowledgments of The Passages of H. M. that "this is a novel, not a literary biography (453). In his contribution to this cluster, Parini reects on some " fl of the differences between bio ction and biography.
Biography Books
A biography (from the Greek words bios meaning "life", and graphos meaning "write") is a non-fictional account of a person's life. Biographies are written by an author who is not the subject/focus of the book.
The Novel: A Biography
The Novel: A Biography. Hardcover - May 12, 2014. by Michael Schmidt (Author) 4.7 49 ratings. See all formats and editions. The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and ...
What is a Novel
A novel is a lengthy, fictional narrative written in prose, typically focusing on the development of characters, an engaging plot structure, and a coherent theme. As a literary work, it provides readers with a window into the human experience, often exploring the complexities of emotions, relationships, and societal issues.
How to Write a Biography: A 7-Step Guide [+Template]
7. Get feedback and polish the text. If you're going to publish your own biography, you'll have to polish it to professional standards. After leaving your work to rest for a while, look at it with fresh eyes and edit your own manuscript eliminating passive voice, filler words, and redundant adverbs.
Rabbi Irving Greenberg's life work celebrating Judaism summed up in new
Rabbi Irving Greenberg's life work celebrating Judaism summed up in new book It is the book that you need to read right now. It will change your view of Judaism and of the world itself.
Opera Eucalyptus is a lush adaptation of Murray Bail's novel
Bail's story comes to life While Bail's original story takes place at an unspecified time on "a property in western New South Wales", director Michael Gow's program notes a setting in ...
In Rachel Kushner's New Novel, a Spy Infiltrates the Left
In Rachel Kushner's fourth novel, Creation Lake, a world-weary spy infiltrates a leftist commune. Hoping to entrap its leaders, she ends up being consumed by the strain of living a double life. In the late 1970s, Michael Bettaney, a fascist sympathizer who made the familiar British journey from ...
Is Netflix's The Perfect Couple based on a novel? Storyline explored
The Netflix adaptation of the novel is headed by a brilliant group of cast and crew who bring to life the story by Hilderbrand. Nicole Kidman heads up the cast. Nicole Kidman heads up the cast.
'The Perfect Couple' Review: Nicole Kidman's Nantucket Whodunit
The actress and Liev Schrieber play the wealthy parents of a groom whose wedding celebrations are crashed by a cadaver in this Netflix series based on the Elin Hilderbrand novel.
Melania Trump's Memoir: Release Date and More ...
According to the publisher's site, the book is set for release on Oct. 8, strategically timed for the final weeks of the current campaign cycle as Trump seeks re-election in a face-off with ...
Wicked Collector's Edition by Gregory Maguire: Pre-Order Book on Sale
In Anticipation of 'Wicked' Film, the Novel That Inspired It Gets a Collector's Edition Re-Release. How to pre-order a limited-edition copy of Gregory Maguire's novel (with a 30 percent ...