How to start an autobiography

Self-written biography

For information of autobiographies on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Autobiography.For other uses, see Autobiography (disambiguation).

An autobiography,^[a] sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written biography of one's own life.

Definition

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the EnglishperiodicalThe Monthly Review, when he suggested the word as a hybrid, but condemned it as "pedantic".

However, its next recorded use was in its present sense, by Robert Southey in 1809.^[2] Despite only being named early in the nineteenth century, first-person autobiographical writing originates in antiquity.

Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective mode of journal or diary writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of a life from a particular moment in time, while the diary, however reflective it may be, moves through a series of mo