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For music albums named 's autobiography.]] An autobiography, from the Greek ''autos'', 'self', ''bios'', 'life' and ''graphein'', 'write', is a Biography written by the subject or composed conjointly with a collaborative writer (styled "as told to" or "with"). The term was first used by the poet Robert Southey in 1809 in the English periodical Quarterly Review , but the form is much older. Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. A name for such a work in Antiquity was an '','' essentially more self-justification than introspection. John Henry Newman 's autobiography is his '' Apologia Pro Vita Sua .'' Augustine applied the title '' Confessions '' to his autobiographical work (and Jean-Jacques Rousseau took up the same title). Probably the most famous German autobiography is still Goethe's '' Dichtung Und Wahrheit ''. A framed his life memoir as one of his Oration s, not the public kind, but the literary kind that would be read aloud in the privacy of one's study. This kind of memoir refers to the idea in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome , that memoirs were like "memos," pieces of unfinished and unpublished writing which a writer might use as a memory aid to make a more finished document later on. In more recent times, memoirs are also life stories which can be about the writer and about another person at the Until the last 20 years or so, few people without some degree of fame tried to write and publish a memoir. But with the critical and commercial success in the United States of such memoirs '' Angela's Ashes '' and '' The Color Of Water '' more and more people have been encouraged to try their hand at this genre. Paul Delaney has coined the term "ad hoc autobiography" to describe an autobiography motivated by the desire to exploit some temporary notoriety. Such autobiographies, often written by a Ghostwriter , are routinely published on the lives of professional athletes and media celebrities—and to a lesser extent about politicians. Some celebrities admit to not having read their "autobiographies." The term fictional-autobiography has been coined to define any novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own biography. These novels generally do not follow a strict autobiographical guideline as they are still fictional. Carol Shield's novel, " The Stone Diaries " is an example of a fictional autobiography. The term " Alphabiography " has been coined to denote an autobiography that consists of twenty-six chapters, the title of each starting with a different letter of the Alphabet . A fairly common joke to describe things which make no sense or pointless jokes states "That made as much sense as having an autobiography with an attached page saying 'About the Author'." NOTABLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
SECONDARY LITERATURE
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