The Biography Portal

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts (education, work, relationships, and death), a biography also portrays a subject's experience of these events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of a subject's personality.

Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Biographical works in diverse media—from literature to film—form the genre known as biography.

An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation, and, at times, participation of a subject or a subject's heirs.

An autobiography is about a life of a subject, written by that subject or sometimes with a collaborator.

More about biographies…

Featured biography

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (18 November 1836 – 29 May 1911) was a British dramatist, librettist and illustrator best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. Gilbert's most popular collaborations with Sullivan, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado (one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre) and most of their other Savoy operas continue to be performed regularly today throughout the English-speaking world and beyond by opera companies, repertory companies, schools and community theatre groups. Lines from these works have permanently entered the English language, including "short, sharp shock", "What never? Well, hardly ever!", and "let the punishment fit the crime". (Read more...)

Selected portrait

Walt Whitman (born Walter Whitman) (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist born in West Hills, Huntington on Long Island in New York. Two of his most famous works are Franklin Evans and Leaves of Grass. (Read more...)

Photo credit: George C. Cox (1887), Source: Library of Congress.

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By time • Lists of people

On this day – May 25

Births

• 1803 - Ralph Waldo Emerson, (pictured) American essayist and philosopher (d. 1882)
• 1889 - Igor Sikorsky, Russian inventor (d. 1972)
• 1892 - Josip Broz Tito, one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement (d.1980)
• 1939 - Ian McKellen, English actor
• 1958 - Paul Weller, British musician
• 1963 - Mike Myers, Canadian actor and comedian
• 1975 - Lauryn Hill, American singer
• 1979 - Jonny Wilkinson, English international and Newcastle Falcons rugby player

Deaths

• 1085 - Pope Gregory VII
• 1261 - Pope Alexander IV
• 1926 - Symon Petlura, Ukrainian politician and statesman (b. 1879)
• 1934 - Gustav Holst, English composer (b. 1874)
• 1954 - Robert Capa, Hungarian-born photojournalist (Killed on Assignment) (b. 1913)
• 1996 - Bradley Nowell, American singer and guitarist (Sublime) (drug overdose) (b. 1968)
• 2005 - Graham Kennedy, Australian television personality (b. 1934)

Recent days: May 24 – May 23 – May 22

Did you know...

• ... that Poet Ali Haider accepted the Sufi position of Hazrat Mai Safoora Qadiriyya after watching her famous miracle of praying Salah in Ravi river ?
• ... that Queen Victoria rescued Dash the Dog from a carriage accident?
• ... that Dutch merchant Hendrik Pieter Nicolaas Muller established the Oost-Afrikaansche Compagnie (East African Trading Company) in 1882, which was to be mainly successful in West Africa, and is a trade mark for quality in Liberia to this day.
• ... that Ronald Skirth, an artilleryman in the British Army during World War One, deliberately mistargeted British guns to prevent the loss of enemy life?
• 
  ... that botanist Thomas Frederic Cheeseman (pictured) had a wide range of interests: he also described a few species of marine gastropods?
• ... former Regimental Sergeant Major Harry Lapwood was known as having the loudest voice in the New Zealand House of Representatives?
• ... that in 1951, Bulgarian politician and exile G. M. Dimitrov helped found the first Bulgarian NATO company?
• ... that Edith Killgore Kirkpatrick published a short book of favorite songs titled Louisiana Let's Sing in honor of her husband Claude's unsuccessful candidacy for Governor of Louisiana in 1963?
• ... that canal engineer Hugh Henshall was both pupil of and brother-in-law to James Brindley, the famous canal architect of the Industrial Revolution?
• 
  ... that Jagadguru Rāmabhadrācārya (pictured), a Hindu religious leader who has been blind since the age of two months and never used Braille or any other aid to learn or compose, can speak 22 languages.

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See also: Biographies of living persons • Manual of Style (biographies)

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