Is Biography the Core Genre of Literature? [View all]

I researched Henry Hudson for a documentary. We were sorting out the myths that were created around him and why. This led me to the larger question of why biography is such high volume genre and why is it so popular.

Hudson wrote nothing about himself and the best record we have of his 1609 journey comes from Robert Juet, a senior crew member. Juet refers to Hudson only as "the master" and never by name. Nothing is known about Henry Hudson outside of the logs of 4 annual voyages -- 1607, 1608, 1609, 1610 -- plus his contracts with Dutch investors. Yet this lack of information has not led to any shortage of biographies of Hudson. The earliest and most influential was not a complete biography but biographical assertions which Adrian van der Donck created for his ~1640 push for the Dutch to fight for their claims in the area that is now NJ, NY and eastern PA. Van der Donck is the one who claimed that Hudson was Dutch and Dutchified his name to "Hendrick Hudson." So the thrust of biographies about Hudson and similar figures (Drake, Cabot, Columbus) was geopolitical, eg to create narratives that seek to justify land claims.

But my interest shifted, as often happens with deep research, to the larger arc of human story telling, myths, religion, nationalism and the history of History.

Until recently, History was a branch of Literature, eg it was acceptable, perhaps preferred, that history be fictionalized, romanticized, etc. and that the protagonists be idolized. The epic of Gilgamesh presents history, politics and religion in the form of a fictional biography of a mythical figure. The New Testament has a similar dynamic. Jumping forward we get to Washington Irving, cited as the first major US author and his style, which plays loose and free with facts for humorous effect, is often misunderstood. Irving famously wrote biografiction about Columbus which introduced the ideas that Columbus alone thought "the world was round". Irving repeats van der Donck's lie about Hudson being Dutch, refers to him as "Hendrick" and uses him to satirize the Dutch in his 1819 publication "Rip Van Winkle". Irving made a career out of biogra-fiction and went so far as to create a hoax via a newspaper ad to promote his Sleepy Hollow publication.

It is only more recently that more truth and nuance was expected in biographies and this mirrors the shift in History as a discipline. History has been a Bachelor of Arts degree -- not a science -- but we are in a wonderful period when technology is being applied in a wide variety of ways including genetics, LiDAR, forensics, psychological profiling and cross cultural analyses. History is rapidly becoming a science and not everyone is happy about that, for example the defenders of the traditional "Shakespeare" biography. That is whole other rabbit hole but I bring it up because it illustrates the shift and division so well. I ran into the Shakespeare biography during my Hudson research and found that the Shakespeare biography is captured and defended by Literature departments, not historians. The power of biography is such that fictionalized biographies of "Shakespeare" have distorted truths about that era.

The power of biography is that the format boils large, complicated and wide ranging areas of interest down to a peer-to-peer level. In other words, it is much easier to understand politics, religion, economics, philosophy and history when it comes in the form of a story with one central figure. Until you get to "American Graffiti" (1973) there is little appetite for stories with multiple protagonists. In the streaming era, multiple protagonist as more the rule than the exception but biography, especially political autobiography remains the best selling genre after cookbooks.

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Barack Obama’s memoir A Promised Land, published in 2020, sold more copies in its first four weeks of publication than any other biography in history. It sold 1.9 million copies in four weeks. His wife’s memoir, Becoming by Michelle Obama, published in 2018, sold 1.8 million copies in its first four weeks. These are also the fastest-selling biographies to ever be published when you look at Week 1 sales. These books sold 831,300 and 645,900 copies in their first weeks respectively. The newly-published memoir by Prince Harry, Spare, which was published in 2023 by Penguin Random House, sold 629,300 copies in its first week to become the third fastest-selling biography to ever be published

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Source: NPD Bookscan

https://bloggingwizard.com/book-sales-statistics/

I am in the process of breaking down biographies into their key elements and looking at how the shift toward nonfiction (if there really is a shift) is playing out. Have read many recently including those on Harry Cohn, Johnny Roselli, Edison, Musk, Kamala Harris, Thomas Cole, William Fox, Killiaen van Rensselaer, Roald Amundsen and Bill (not Billy) Graham, I tend to think that many older biographies will be rewritten in the coming years.

I of course welcome all thoughts and reactions.