Political autobiographies

Introduction to Political Biography in Literature and Cinema

Biographers have a strong impact on our perception of history. For they offer narratives of the lives of political leaders that necessarily defend a thesis of one sort or another, whether they pretend to strive to comprehend how their individual character has underpinned their political responses to particular crises, or present an overtly biased portrait of historical figures. Biography scholars Hans Renders and Binne de Haan contend that biography designates “the study of the life of an individual, based on the methods of historical scholarship, with the goal of illuminating what is public, explained and interpreted in part from the perspective of the personal” (Theoretical Discussions of Biography. Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, 2014). Since the early nineteenth century, journalists have often played the role of political biographers, turning such figures as Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln into “champions and guardians of American character ideal, attending to the virtues, vices an

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