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A biography is usually written both to inform and to entertain. This means it is a mix of factual information and creative writing. The audience is usually made up of people who are interested in the person being written about. However, sometimes biographies of people who aren’t well known can be interesting because of an experience that they’ve had.

Example

This is the opening paragraph of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens, the novelist. The young man she is describing is Dickens, aged 37.

14 January 1840, London. An inquest is being held at Marylebone Workhouse, a muddled complex of buildings spread over a large area between the Marylebone Road and Paddington Street. The Beadle, a parish officer responsible for persuading householders to do their duty as jurors at such inquests, has assembled twelve men. Most of them are middle-aged local tradesmen, but one stands out among them as different. He is young and slight, smartly dressed and good-looking, neither tall nor short at five foot nine inches, with dark hair falling in curls over his forehead and collar. He is a new resident who has just moved into a fine airy house with a large garden, close to Regent’s Park at York Gate: it is No. 1 Devonshire Terrace, from which the Beadle has made haste to summon him to his duty.

Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin

Analysis

Tomalin, the writer of this extract:

• uses many literary techniques to create an accurate image of the scene for the reader, ‘a muddled complex of buildings’
• starts in the middle of a story, rather than at the beginning of Dickens’s life, to grab the reader’s attention and highlight a specific event of interest
• focuses on the person that the biography is about
• gives us detail about the person, so we can imagine him ‘He is young and slight, smartly dressed and good-looking’
• contrasts the person to the ‘middle-aged tradesmen’ to make him seem special by describing him in a romantic way ‘dark hair falling in curls over his forehead’