An autobiography is the biography of a person written by himself and that is generally written in the first person.
In it there is no fiction, everything that is related is real, it has happened, and for this reason it is that for many it enjoys a special interest.
Biography written in the first person by its protagonist who is usually a famous personality in some field
Here the author and protagonist of the book are the same person and although today there is a tremendous paraphernalia behind this literary proposal, that is, a vast and millionaire industry that supports it, we must say that this genre has been present since always, of the most ancient times. remote from humanity; and it has arisen directly from the need of some personalities to put their experiences or trajectories on paper so that thousands of people know them.
Autobiography authors are almost always personalities who are part of, or who for some reason are close to the world of entertainment.
The content is varied, as are the experiences that any human being has during his life; Traditionally, a person in his autobiography will relate everything that has happened to him from his birth until the moment in which he has started to write his autobiography. The first years of life, the composition of his family, achievements, failures, studies, love relationships, children, trips, unforgettable experiences, putting special emphasis on precisely the latter, which are definitely the ones that most capture the attention of fans, followers .
Although the famous is usually very jealous of their privacy in many cases, there are also many who choose to make these books to prevent others from writing about them, especially uncomfortable issues or that would not leave them well standing. That is, the famous person writes the best version of him and the one that best closes his personal and professional history, even if he lies in many places or has to hide certain information that does not make him so famous.
In any case, the unauthorized biography that deals with revealing hidden truths in the autobiography always appears.
Exceptional value for meeting a character
Beyond these considerations, we must say that the autobiography has a high historical value because, for example, it allows the reader and the historian to understand a character and interpret why he acted in such a way during this or that moment of his life.
Differences with biography, memoirs and intimate diary
Although in some way the autobiography has something of other genres such as the biography, memoirs and personal diary it is distinguished from them by several issues ...
It differs from the biography especially by the identity between the narrator and the protagonist of the story, which does not happen in the case of the biography; Regarding the memories, he distances himself from this in that the accent is placed on the private life of the person who assumes the role of narrator, while the memories focus his interest especially on the external events of the protagonist's life; and from the intimate diary it distances itself because the autobiography is a retrospective of the narrator's life, that is, a long time has passed from what it narrates, on the other hand, the intimate diary supposes a writing parallel to the succession of the events that are written.
Although there are examples in history, the autobiographical genre has achieved an enormous diffusion more than anything in these times, especially since it has become the favorite of those famous artists who make use of it to give an account of their life experiences to his followers, eager to discover them.
A successful genre
Meanwhile, based on the interest that this type of reading has aroused in the public, the publishing industry has been able to build a very profitable business around autobiographies.
In recent decades, autobiography came to be considered a literary genre and almost all of its proposals immediately became best-sellers.
If we were to delve into the cause of the latter and provide an interpretation, surely, this is closely linked with the desire of the human being to know more and more, especially the intimate, of those shining personalities of some field, to know them in their intimacy and through this knowledge to be able to identify with them, because of course, they do not cease to be human to those who experience the same things as to all the unknown.
Nor can we avoid that many of these stories written in the first person that become success are usually adapted to the big screen.
