Life studies

Dr. Samuel Johnson, himself an accomplished biographer (and the subject of probably the most famous biography in the English language, Boswell's "Life of Johnson"), wrote that "no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography." No other form, he declared, can "more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition."

That was written in 1750. Since then biography has gone through an extraordinary evolution. Today it is pursued across all media, not just writing. It has become, in fact, the most popular area of nonfiction publishing and broadcasting. From People magazine to A&E's Biography channel, the urge to interview, record, investigate, and speculate about real individuals has become insatiable -- leading to heated debates about our right to privacy and the line separating fiction and nonfiction.

Yet, despite the fact that biography has moved to the forefront of the arts today, appearing in every medium from biopics to blogs, the academy still won't deign to touch it. There is no university in the continental United States that has a department of biography -- the only one that I know of is in Hawaii. College courses that do examine aspects of the genre, and explore its long history, are few and far between.

The history of biography precedes even Dr. Johnson's time by many thousands of years. From the moment men and women first began to record, in song, the sagas of their forebears, human society has demonstrated an insistent need both to record and interpret the lives of real people: to celebrate their achievements, but also to explore their personalities -- the better, perhaps, to know our own.

From Xenophon, Plutarch, and Suetonius, biographers attempted to draw inspiration and example from the lives of past individuals -- as did the biographers of Jesus of Nazareth -- but it was Dr. Johnson who saw the importance of intimate portrayal in exploring man's constant struggle between vice and virtue. Chroniclers who contented themselves with what he called "panegyrick" were doing society a disservice, he felt. "If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shewn," he warned Boswell, "we should sit down in despondency, and think it impossible to imitate them in any thing."

Nineteenth-century biographers attempted to follow Dr. Johnson's precepts. The distinguished biographer John Forster tried to allow his readers to see into Dickens's tormented soul by recounting the novelist's marital problems, but his contemporaries were not amused. Alarmed, potential subjects of biography, their wives, widows, and families became "keepers of the flame": hoarding and often burning evidence of private lives, from Byron's and Shelley's to those of Tennyson and Henry James. Even so, biographers managed to furnish extraordinarily detailed records of their luminaries, such as Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott" or J.A. Froude's "Thomas Carlyle," using letters and diaries, as well as personal recollections, to wonderful effect.

It was only in the early 20th century, with Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians," however, that the chains holding down biographers were finally broken -- and biography was able to begin competing with other arts: exploring the true, intimate character of specific individuals and, through them, opening a window onto the human condition.

As the Second World War swept western civilization into its struggle, the lives of real people -- from GIs to generals, aircraft technicians to housewives -- were portrayed in newsreels, magazines, radio programs, and the cinema. And in the decades after the war's end many of the taboos forbidding discussion of sexuality, race, and gender in biography were also swept away as biographers expanded their depth, range, artistry, and media. Once the Supreme Court abolished libel protection for public figures in 1964, biography was virtually licensed to kill. Autobiography, in particular, exploded with a frankness unthinkable only a generation before -- and as that happened, it proved more and more difficult to argue that the lives of poets such as Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton were irrelevant to discussions of their poetry.

Meanwhile, scholarly research -- especially the use of oral history -- made it ever easier to reconstruct the lives of biographees -- though it raised, once again, serious questions about who benefits from biographical attention, and who gets hurt. As Janet Malcolm wrote in "The Silent Woman," her book about Plath (1994), the biographer at work was "like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away."

Biographers took little note of such complaints. Either the jewelry was too scintillating, or the money too good, or the opportunity to explore the unique mystery of another individual's real life, with all its vicissitudes, triumphs, and failures, proved too strong -- and resonated too well with a public incurably curious. Today, the biographical imperative shows up in everything from tabloid exposés to major television productions (documentaries, dramas, and docudramas); from operas to multi-volume print biographies; from photography to plays and websites.

Taking their cue from fictional artists, biographical artists have changed the face of the form. Edmund Morris, the distinguished biographer of President Theodore Roosevelt, dared invent himself as a participant in his authorized life of another president, Ronald Reagan, in 1999. He was excoriated by some -- yet Peter Ackroyd had done much the same in his "Dickens," in 1990, and soon other biographers, too, were fictionalizing their "real" subjects.

Biography is no longer what it was just a century ago, when serious English biographers hoped for a peerage or knighthood for lauding prime ministers. It is wide-ranging, sophisticated -- and contested. I scarcely know a single biographer who has not had to face a lawsuit (including Janet Malcolm -- and myself), so problematic has the business of biography become in our society, from copyright issues to libel and plagiarism. How could it be otherwise, when people's reputations are at stake?

Is it really right, then, that we should still refuse to teach the history, theory, and practice of biography, in all its media, at our colleges, given that real-life depiction has become so central to our Western way of life? By studying the nature, art, craft, agendas, genres, rules, ethics, research methods, and the different media approaches to biography, we can improve our appreciation of a significant aspect of our civilization -- and encourage better, more honest, more insightful, and more learned biographical works.

We could also fulfill Dr. Johnson's vision of modern biography. "If we owe regard to the memory of the dead," he wrote, "there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth."

Nigel Hamilton, a biographer and historian, is the author of "Monty" and "JFK: Reckless Youth." His latest book is "Biography: A Brief History." He is a fellow of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies, UMass-Boston, where he is working on a multi-volume life of President Clinton.