An
autobiography, from the Greek auton, self, bios, life and graphein, write is a biography written by the subject or composed
conjointly with a collaborative writer. The term dates from the late eighteenth century but the form is much older.Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an
autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. A name for such a work in Antiquity was an apologia essentially more self-justification than introspection. John Henry Newman's autobiography is his Apologia pro vita sua
. Augustine applied the title Confessions to his autobiographical work Probably the most famous German autobiography is still Goethe's Dichtung and Wahrhiet.The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the first secular biography published in the United States, served as a model for subsequent American
autobiographies. African-American autobiography has developed from slave narratives. Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois both published autobiographies.A memoir is slightly different from an autobiography. Traditionally, a memoir focuses on the "life and times" of the character, while an autobiography has a narrower, more intimate focus on his or her own memories, feelings and emotions. Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. In the eighteenth century candalous memoirs were written by prostitutes or libertines these were widely read in France for their juicy gossip. But memoir has another meaning too. The pagan rhetor Libanuis framed his life memoir as one of his orations not the public kind but the literary kind that would be read aloud in the privacy of one's study. This kind of memoir refers to the idea in ancient Greece and Rome that memoirs were like memos, pieces of unfinished and unpublished writing which a writer might use as a memory aid to make a more finished document later on. In more recent times, memoirs are also life stories which can be about the writer and about another person at the same time.Modern memoirs are often based on old diaries, letters, and photographs. Although the term memoir may have begun to replace autobiography in its popular usage the former term applies to a work more restrictive in scope.Until the last 20 years or so, few people without some degree of fame tried to write and publish a memoir. But with the critical and commercial success in the United States of such memoirs Angela's Ashes and The Colour of Water more and more people have been encouraged to try their hand at this genre.Paul Delaney has coined the term ad hoc autobiography to describe an autobiography motivated by the desire to exploit some temporary notoriety. Such autobiographies, often written by a ghostwriter, are routinely published on the lives of professional athletes and media celebrities—and to a lesser extent about politicians. Some celebrities admit to not having read their autobiographies.Mark Twain was probably the first popular person to include photography in his autobiography. He was especially interested and involved on the taking of the pictures to control his photographic persona