from PART FIVE - TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Personality-culture
Biography and autobiography have flourished in the last thirty years of the twentieth century. Both are stacked high in book shops and are among the books most borrowed from the public library. A glance at a current list of bestselling non-fiction reveals that six out often hardback bestsellers and eight out often paperback are either biography or autobiography. ‘Celebrity’ lives abound – the autobiographies of reformed villains and alcoholic footballers, rags to riches tales of pop stars or the scandalous accounts of high society (Andrew Morton’s biography of the Princess of Wales, Diana.: Her True Story sold millions worldwide after its publication in 1992); equally popular, however, are the painstakingly researched and weighty lives of writers and artists, scientists and politicians – ‘literary biographies’ – which together with the ‘literary memoir’ form part of what publishers now call ‘literary non-fiction’, a more elevated mix of specialist subject and trade publisher (among the surprise successes was Stella Tillyard’s Aristocrats,published in 1994, which followed the lives of the four Lennox sisters in late eighteenth-century England and Ireland, and Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self,which won the Whitbread Prize in 2001, and was a bestseller).
Not surprisingly, biographers are the first to claim the supremacy of their own sphere. Indeed, according to one of its main practitioners, Richard Holmes, literary biography is ‘arguably the most successful, and intellectually stimulating, literary form which has held a general readership in Britain’ since the 19605.
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