Autobiography

An autobiography, from the Greek αὐτός autos "self", βίος bios "life" and γράφειν graphein "to write",, is a biography written by the predicate or composed conjointly with a joint writer (styled "as told to" or "with"). The term was first used by the poet Robert Southey in 1809 in the English journal Quarterly Review, but the form goes back to ancient times. Biographers usually rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography however may be based completely on the writer's memory. Closely associated with autobiography (and sometimes difficult to exactly differentiate from it) is the form of memoir.