chart of biography

A Chart of Biography

1765 biographical chart by joseph priestley / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In 1765, 18th-century British polymath Joseph Priestley published A Chart of Biography and its accompanying prose description as a supplement to his Lectures on History and General Policy . [1] Priestley believed that the chart and A New Chart of History (1769) would allow students to "trace out distinctly the dependence of events to distribute them into such periods and divisions as shall lay the whole claim of past transactions in a just and orderly manner." [2]

The Chart of Biography covers a vast timespan, from 1200 BC to 1800 AD, and includes two thousand names. Priestley organized his list into six categories: Statesman and Warriors; Divines and Metaphysicians; Mathematicians and Physicians (natural philosophers were placed here); Poets and Artists; Orators and Critics (prose fiction authors were placed here); and Historians and Antiquarians (lawyers were placed here). Priestley's "principle of selection" was fame, not merit; therefore, as he mentions, the chart is a reflection of current opinion. He also wanted to ensure that his readers would recognize the entries on the chart. Priestley had difficulty assigning all of the people listed to individual categories; he attempted to list them in the category under which their most important work had been done. Machiavelli is therefore listed as a historian rather than a statesman and Cicero is listed as a statesman instead of an orator. The chart was also arranged in order of importance; "statesmen are placed on the lower margin, where they are easier to see, because they are the names most familiar to readers." [3] [4]

Both Charts were popular for decades—the A New Chart of History went through fifteen editions by 1816. [5] The trustees of Warrington were so impressed with Priestley's lectures and charts that they arranged for the University of Edinburgh to grant him a Doctor of Law degree in 1764. [6]

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Historical data visualisations at Princeton, part 3: Chart of Biography

This is the final post about the wonders of my visit to Princeton to see some of the best examples in the history of data visualization. In my first post, I covered DuBourg’s 1753 Charte Chronographique . Part 2 looked at Priestley’s 1765 Chart of History . In this final post, the climax of the visit was when the Chart of Biography was also brought to the table.

This visit had surpassed any expectation I could possibly have had. On the table in front of me were three pieces vital to the history of data visualization. These pioneers’ ideas form the DNA of every chart we build today. It was a privilege to have them on one table in front of us.

The chart of biography shows the life spans of over 2000 people of note, from 1200BCE to 1765. The x-axis shows time, and the horizontal groupings organise people according to their type of person they were (politician, artist, statesman, warrior, etc). Priestley’s intent was to show the history and development of humanity with one sweep of the eye.

Like the other pieces, seeing the pieces live is a completely different experience to looking at photos. I’ll try to convey some of what we discovered.

First of all, every chart needs a good title, and, boy, Priestley knew how to make a good title. Check this out:

Try making a title like that in your next dataviz!

Second, all great data projects have a description to accompany them, and this one was no different:

Priestley wrote a wonderful description of the data project, explaining the difficulty of data collection, the beauty of exploring data, and the reasoning behind his visualization choices. It’s a very good read and one I’ve blogged about previously .

The marks are Gantt bars. The length represents the lifespan of each individual:

I described in my previous post how Priestley was visualising uncertainty. He does it here, too. The dots show where the birth/death year of an individual is uncertain.

In some cases, there is very little certainty about someone’s timeline. For example, the specifics of Hillel’s birth and death are not known:

As with the Chart of Biography, Priestley also future proofed his chart by leaving space for new additions to be added to the engraved plate. He made the chart in 1765, but extended the axis out to 1800:

At this point, I was sated. We had a table with three of the most important visualizations of all time on it. My visit had surpassed every possible expectation.

What does it all mean? The historical visualizations teach us so much:

• Most of what we worry about today in our field has been worried about for a long long time.
• When you create a chart in software, you’re repeating the steps taken by pioneers from 250+ years ago.
• Creativity stems from many places. The pen and paper are mighty tools to think differently and open up new ideas.

Feel free to go back and look at the first two posts, about the Carte Chronographique and the Chart of History .

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Related posts.

Joseph Priestley’s 1765 Big Data Case Study

Historical data visualisations at Princeton, part 1: DuBourg

Pie or stacked bar?

“Don’t size by area,” said Brinton.

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Joseph Priestley's Chart of Biography

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This is Joseph Priestley's Description of his own Chart of Biography, one of the first timelines. An illustration of a small part of his timeline is visible on the left hand side. It organised several centuries of historic time on a constant timescale. Lines were used - for the first time ever - to show the duration of each individual's life. Priestley used dots at the end of a lifeline if he was not sure of the date - also an innovation at the time. I bought this book from a bookshop in Canterbury a couple of years ago. There are very few examples surviving of the actual chart, but there is one in the British Library and one at Chetham's Library in Manchester. The first editions of the timeline and of this little book date from 1765.

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A: London, England, United Kingdom

Joseph Priestley Issues the First Biographical Timeline Chart Depicting 2000 Lives

British theologian, dissenting clergyman, natural philosopher, educator, and political theorist Joseph Priestley  published  A Chart of Biography in London with text entitled  A Description of a Chart of Biography   in 1765. Priestley's work was the first biographical timeline chart, in which individual bars were used to visualize the life span of a person, allowing the comparison of the lifespans of many people, in this case 2000 people on one large, dense chart.

"The Chart of Biography covers a vast timespan, from 1200 BC to 1800 AD, and includes two thousand names. Priestley organized his list into six categories: Statesman and Warriors; Divines and Metaphysicians; Mathematicians and Physicians (natural philosophers were placed here); Poets and Artists; Orators and Critics (prose fiction authors were placed here); and Historians and Antiquarians (lawyers were placed here). Priestley's 'principle of selection' was fame, not merit; therefore, as he mentions, the chart is a reflection of current opinion. He also wanted to ensure that his readers would recognize the entires on the chart. Priestley had difficulty assigning all of the people listed to individual categories; he attempted to list them in the category under which their most important work had been done. Machiavelli is therefore listed as a historian rather than a statesman and Cicero is listed as a statesman instead of an orator. The chart was also arranged in order of importance; 'statesmen are placed on the lower margin, where they are easier to see, because they are the names most familiar to readers' " (Wikipedia article on A Chart of Biography , accessed 03-16-2010).

Rosenberg & Grafton, Cartographies of Time (2010) 116-17, plate 19.

Timeline Themes

History of Now

The Surprising History of the Infographic

Early iterations saved soldiers’ lives, debunked myths about slavery and helped Americans settle the frontier

Clive Thompson

As the 2016 election approaches, we’re hearing a lot about “red states” and “blue states.” That idiom has become so ingrained that we’ve almost forgotten where it originally came from: a data visualization.

In the 2000 presidential election, the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so razor close that broadcasters pored over electoral college maps—which they typically colored red and blue. What’s more, they talked about those shadings. NBC’s Tim Russert wondered aloud how George Bush would “get those remaining 61 electoral red states, if you will,” and that language became lodged in the popular imagination. America became divided into two colors—data spun into pure metaphor. Now Americans even talk routinely about “purple” states, a mental visualization of political information.

We live in an age of data visualization. Go to any news website and you’ll see graphics charting support for the presidential candidates; open your iPhone and the Health app will generate personalized graphs showing how active you’ve been this week, month or year. Sites publish charts showing how the climate is changing, how schools are segregating, how much housework mothers do versus fathers. And newspapers are increasingly finding that readers love “dataviz”: In 2013, the New York Times ’ most-read story for the entire year was a visualization of regional accents across the United States . It makes sense. We live in an age of Big Data. If we’re going to understand our complex world, one powerful way is to graph it.

But this isn’t the first time we’ve discovered the pleasures of making information into pictures. Over a hundred years ago, scientists and thinkers found themselves drowning in their own flood of data—and to help understand it, they invented the very idea of infographics.

The idea of visualizing data is old: After all, that’s what a map is—a representation of geographic information—and we’ve had maps for about 8,000 years. But it was rare to graph anything other than geography. Only a few examples exist: Around the 11th century, a now-anonymous scribe created a chart of how the planets moved through the sky. By the 18th century, scientists were warming to the idea of arranging knowledge visually. The British polymath Joseph Priestley produced a “Chart of Biography,” plotting the lives of about 2,000 historical figures on a timeline. A picture, he argued, conveyed the information “with more exactness, and in much less time, than it [would take] by reading.”

Still, data visualization was rare because data was rare. That began to change rapidly in the early 19th century, because countries began to collect—and publish—reams of information about their weather, economic activity and population. “For the first time, you could deal with important social issues with hard facts, if you could find a way to analyze it,” says Michael Friendly, a professor of psychology at York University who studies the history of data visualization. “The age of data really began.”

An early innovator was the Scottish inventor and economist William Playfair. As a teenager he apprenticed to James Watt, the Scottish inventor who perfected the steam engine. Playfair was tasked with drawing up patents, which required him to develop excellent drafting and picture-drawing skills. After he left Watt’s lab, Playfair became interested in economics and convinced that he could use his facility for illustration to make data come alive.

“An average political economist would have certainly been able to produce a table for publication, but not necessarily a graph,” notes Ian Spence, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who’s writing a biography of Playfair. Playfair, who understood both data and art, was perfectly positioned to create this new discipline.

In one famous chart, he plotted the price of wheat in the United Kingdom against the cost of labor. People often complained about the high cost of wheat and thought wages were driving the price up. Playfair’s chart showed this wasn’t true: Wages were rising much more slowly than the cost of the product.

“He wanted to discover,” Spence notes. “He wanted to find regularities or points of change.” Playfair’s illustrations often look amazingly modern: In one, he drew pie charts—his invention, too—and lines that compared the size of various country’s populations against their tax revenues. Once again, the chart produced a new, crisp analysis: The British paid far higher taxes than citizens of other nations.

Neurology was not yet a robust science, but Playfair seemed to intuit some of its principles. He suspected the brain processed images more readily than words: A picture really was worth a thousand words. “He said things that sound almost like a 20th-century vision researcher,” Spence adds. Data, Playfair wrote, should “speak to the eyes”—because they were “the best judge of proportion, being able to estimate it with more quickness and accuracy than any other of our organs.” A really good data visualization, he argued, “produces form and shape to a number of separate ideas, which are otherwise abstract and unconnected.”

Soon, intellectuals across Europe were using data visualization to grapple with the travails of urbanization, such as crime and disease. In France in the 1830s, a lawyer named André-Michel Guerry created maps showing “moral statistics.” He was among the first to use shadings to show data—darker where crime was worse or illiteracy higher, for example. His maps were controversial, because they rebutted conventional wisdom. French social critics believed that lower education led to crime, but the maps suggested this wasn’t true. “Clearly,” Guerry wrote, “the relationship people talk about does not exist.” Data-based social science was born.

By the middle of the 19th century, “moral statistics” were booming and scientists were using data visualization to quash epidemics. When cholera ravaged London in 1854, the physician John Snow mapped out incidences, and noticed a large cluster around the water pump on Broad Street. The skeptical city council closed the pump, the epidemic subsided, and Snow’s map helped nudge forward a crucial idea: that diseases could be caused by contact with an as-yet-unknown contagion—bacteria.

In mid-19th-century America, one of the biggest social issues was slavery. And it was slavery that propelled some of the country’s most remarkable data visualizations: “slave maps.”

When Southern states began to secede in 1860 and 1861, Union forces invaded Virginia to try to beat back the secessionists. But where should they concentrate their forces? In the midst of the fighting in June 1861, the federal government’s Coast Survey department produced a fascinating map of Virginia that suggested a strategy. Using data from the latest census, the map showed the concentration of slaves in each county of Virginia: The darker the county, the higher the percentage of the population enslaved.

One trend immediately jumped out: eastern Virginia was the hotspot of slavery. The western region was comparatively slave-free. This suggested that the west would care less about fighting to preserve slavery; indeed, it might even switch sides and join the Unionists. The map was a deeply political data visualization, points out Susan Schulten, a historian at the University of Denver and author of  Mapping the Nation . It was trying to show that only a relative minority of Virginians supported—and benefited from—slavery. It suggested military strategy, too: Try to pit the west against the east.

“It was a breakthrough map,” Schulten notes. “It was an attempt to influence how the government saw the nation, and how the military understood it. It drove Lincoln’s attention to where slavery was weakest.”

Soon after, the U.S. Coast Survey produced yet another map charting slave density, except this one covered all the Southern states. President Lincoln was fascinated by this map, consulting it so frequently during the Civil War that it showed “the marks of much service,” as an official portraitist, Francis Bicknell Carpenter, later recalled. One day Carpenter had borrowed the map to examine it, when Lincoln came into the room.

“ You  have appropriated my map, have you?” said Lincoln. “I have been looking all around for it.” The president put on his spectacles, “and sitting down upon a trunk began to pore over it very earnestly,” as Carpenter later wrote. Lincoln pointed to the position where Judson Kilpatrick’s cavalry division of the Army was now fighting Confederate troops. “It is just as I thought it was,” he said. “He is close upon ___County, where slaves are thickest. Now we ought to get a ‘heap’ of them, when he returns.” Much as with the Virginia map, Lincoln used the map to understand the country in a new way—to see where Southerners would be most, and least, eager to fight the North.

By the late 19th century, data visualization had created a new type of citizen. Educated individuals in the U.S. or Europe were increasingly comfortable thinking statistically. “The two dominant words of our time,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1860, “are law and average.”

One true believer was the British nurse Florence Nightingale. As a child she was so bewitched by math that she organized information about her gardening in tables. Statistics, she said, were a tool to know “the thought of God”; when weary, a glance at a table of numbers was “perfectly reviving.”

During the Crimean War she got a chance to wield her data skills. While in the field, Nightingale became appalled at the squalid conditions of army hospitals and soldier barracks, which were mired with feces and vermin. She persuaded Queen Victoria to let her study the issue, and Nightingale teamed up with her friend William Farr, the country’s leading statistician, to analyze army mortality rates. They uncovered a stunning fact: Most of the soldiers in the Crimean War hadn’t died in combat. They’d died of “preventable diseases”—precisely the sort caused by terrible hygiene. Clean up the hygiene and you’d save lives.

Nightingale adroitly realized that tables of numbers and text would be too hard to parse. They needed, she said, a data visualization—“to affect thro’ the Eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears.” Her invention was the elegant “polar area chart,” a new variant of the pie chart: Each slice of the pie showed deaths for one month of the war, growing larger if the deaths increased, and color-coded to show the causes of death. Fans called it the “rose diagram,” because it looked like a flower.

The queen and Parliament could see at a glance the importance of hygiene; they quickly set up a sanitary commission to improve conditions, and death rates fell. Nightingale became one of the first people to successfully use data visualization for persuasion—to influence public policy.

“She was an activist and she wanted to make a difference,” says Lynn McDonald, a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph in Ontario and editor of  The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale .

Visualization even governed how the U.S. territory expanded. Many Americans wanted to move westward, but elites were uncertain whether the interior was suitable for farming. Some believed it was a “Great American Desert”; Joseph Henry, a scientist and Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, regarded the West as “a barren waste...unfit for agriculture,” and he produced maps analyzing Army rainfall data to support his contention. Others fired back with their own data visualizations arguing the opposite: Rainfall patterns in the West were cyclical, they argued, so the land there could certainly support grazing animals. The expansionists eventually won out. The vision of Manifest Destiny was built not just with speeches, but with infographics.

This spring, the  Wall Street Journal  produced a fascinating data visualization titled “ Blue Feed, Red Feed .” On the  Journal’s  website, “visual correspondent” Jon Keegan created an interactive page that shows what Facebook looks like for users who were “very liberal” or “very conservative.” Because Facebook’s newsfeed emphasizes stories friends are “liking,” people with lots of liberal friends tend to get shown lots of left-wing news, and vice versa. Keegan wanted to help readers see just how loud it was inside the echo chamber.

The results were stark: When you looked at the “blue feed,” it showed photos of a strong, resolute-looking Hillary Clinton. The “red feed” showed a post about “Hillary’s toxic plans for the Second Amendment” with the caption “downright evil.”

The age of data, it seems, has even created a new job: the data journalist, who’s comfortable not only making phone calls and writing stories, but writing code and crunching data. For the “Blue Feed, Red Feed” story, Keegan analyzed a large academic data set of Facebook postings. Thanks to programming languages like R or Python, today’s data journalists can make a data visualization on a daily deadline.

“It didn’t used to be even ten years ago that we could build a sophisticated data analysis at the same speed that someone can write a story,” says Scott Klein, a data journalist with ProPublica. “And now we can.” News outlets now often publish entire databases with a search interface, because readers enjoy poking around in the big river of data themselves.

“We can rely on a level of data literacy that we couldn’t rely on 100 years ago, or even 40 years ago,” Klein adds. Everyday people have tools to chart the info of their lives. Google, for example, recently upgraded its online spreadsheets application so that its users can automatically generate visualizations from any data they put inside.

The next step? Virtual reality. Alberto Cairo, a journalism professor at the University of Miami, imagines putting on a VR headset to read a report or watch TV, and watching visualizations swim around in front of him in 3-D. “How can you superimpose a data image over a real image?” he wonders. That’ll be the question for the William Playfairs of this century.

Mapping the Nation

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Clive Thompson is author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better and Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World . He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and Wired . Photo: Tom Igoe.

• Get started

Joseph Priestley’s A Chart of Biography was one of the first examples of a timeline in its current form. The first edition was printed in 1764, and it was reprinted in various editions. Data from the 1st (1764) and 1778 editions are included in this package. A Chart of Biography visualizes the lifespans of more than 2,000 famous individuals from 1300 BCE to 1800 CE. A smaller example chart, “A Specimen of a Chart of Biography”, is displayed below.

This R package contains the data from that chart. It comprises three data sets.

• Biographies contains names, occupations, birth dates, and death dates of the approximately 2,000 individuals in the full chart.
• King contains names and dates of the rulers of major empires, which was used to annotate the axis of the chart.
• Specimen contains the names, occupations, birth dates, and death dates of the individuals in the “Speciment” chart.

priestley is not on CRAN. It can be installed using

• Browse source code at https://​github.com/​jrnold/​priestley
• Report a bug at https://​github.com/​jrnold/​priestley/​issues
• MIT + file LICENSE
• Jeffrey Arnold Author, maintainer

A Chart of Biography

Papers overview.

• R. Khulusi , J. Kusnick , Josef Focht , S. Jänicke
• IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium
• Corpus ID: 199441737

• S. B. Davis
• Corpus ID: 161346164

The Time Charts of Joseph Priestley:

A digital exploration.

• A New Chart of History
• A Chart of Biography

IGL InfoGraphics Lab

• Instruction

Priestley’s Timelines

New Chart of History 1769, Library Company of Philadelphia

This project is a collaboration with Daniel Rosenberg , University of Oregon Professor of History. Together we are transforming Joseph Priestley’s Chart of Biography (1765) and New Chart of History (1769) into interactive infographics. Priestley, a prominent scientist and theologian created what are arguably the first modern timelines, and New Chart of History is one of the most influential artifacts not only in historiography but also in the history of infographic design.

By creating digital versions of the charts, using a data driven process, we seek to 1) facilitate interactive exploration of the charts, 2) analyze Priestley’s methods of infographic design in themselves and in relation to modern graphic techniques, and 3) investigate the assumptions Priestley made about the world when he created the charts.

For related work on this project, please see:

Rosenberg, D. “Joseph Priestley and the Graphic Invention of Modern Time.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture , vol. 36 no. 1, 2007, pp. 55-103. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/sec.2007.0013

Rosenberg, D., Grafton, A. Cartographies of time: A History of the Timeline. 2010 New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

To see more historical tools for visualizing time, presented in interactive digital formats, visit http://timeonline.uoregon.edu .

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A Description of a Chart of Biography. by Joseph Priestley. ... Paperback – June 10, 2010

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• Print length 38 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Gale Ecco, Print Editions
• Publication date June 10, 2010
• Dimensions 7.44 x 0.08 x 9.69 inches
• ISBN-10 1170764894
• ISBN-13 978-1170764893
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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gale Ecco, Print Editions (June 10, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 38 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1170764894
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1170764893
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.03 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.44 x 0.08 x 9.69 inches

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Joseph priestley.

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Blog • Perfecting your Craft

Posted on Jun 30, 2023

How to Write a Biography: A 7-Step Guide [+Template]

From time to time, nonfiction authors become so captivated by a particular figure from either the present or the past, that they feel compelled to write an entire book about their life. Whether casting them as heroes or villains, there is an interesting quality in their humanity that compels these authors to revisit their life paths and write their story.

However, portraying someone’s life on paper in a comprehensive and engaging way requires solid preparation. If you’re looking to write a biography yourself, in this post we’ll share a step-by-step blueprint that you can follow. 

How to write a biography: 

1. Seek permission when possible 

2. research your subject thoroughly, 3. do interviews and visit locations, 4. organize your findings, 5. identify a central thesis, 6. write it using narrative elements, 7. get feedback and polish the text.

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While you technically don’t need permission to write about public figures (or deceased ones), that doesn't guarantee their legal team won't pursue legal action against you. Author Kitty Kelley was sued by Frank Sinatra before she even started to write His Way , a biography that paints Ol Blue Eyes in a controversial light. (Kelley ended up winning the lawsuit, however).  

Whenever feasible, advise the subject’s representatives of your intentions. If all goes according to plan, you’ll get a green light to proceed, or potentially an offer to collaborate. It's a matter of common sense; if someone were to write a book about you, you would likely want to know about it well prior to publication. So, make a sincere effort to reach out to their PR staff to negotiate an agreement or at least a mutual understanding of the scope of your project. 

At the same time, make sure that you still retain editorial control over the project, and not end up writing a puff piece that treats its protagonist like a saint or hero. No biography can ever be entirely objective, but you should always strive for a portrayal that closely aligns with facts and reality.

If you can’t get an answer from your subject, or you’re asked not to proceed forward, you can still accept the potential repercussions and write an unauthorized biography . The “rebellious act” of publishing without consent indeed makes for great marketing, though it’ll likely bring more headaches with it too. 

✋ Please note that, like other nonfiction books, if you intend to release your biography with a publishing house , you can put together a book proposal to send to them before you even write the book. If they like it enough, they might pay you an advance to write it.  

Book Proposal Template

Craft a professional pitch for your nonfiction book with our handy template.

Once you’ve settled (or not) the permission part, it’s time to dive deep into your character’s story.  

Deep and thorough research skills are the cornerstone of every biographer worth their salt. To paint a vivid and accurate portrait of someone's life, you’ll have to gather qualitative information from a wide range of reliable sources. 

Start with the information already available, from books on your subject to archival documents, then collect new ones firsthand by interviewing people or traveling to locations. 

Browse the web and library archives

Put your researcher hat on and start consuming any piece on your subject you can find, from their Wikipedia page to news articles, interviews, TV and radio appearances, YouTube videos, podcasts, books, magazines, and any other media outlets they may have been featured in. 

Establish a system to orderly collect the information you find 一 even seemingly insignificant details can prove valuable during the writing process, so be sure to save them. 

Depending on their era, you may find most of the information readily available online, or you may need to search through university libraries for older references. 

For his landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow spent untold hours at Columbia University’s library , reading through the Hamilton family papers, visiting the New York Historical Society, as well as interviewing the archivist of the New York Stock Exchange, and so on. The research process took years, but it certainly paid off. Chernow discovered that Hamilton created the first five securities originally traded on Wall Street. This finding, among others, revealed his significant contributions to shaping the current American financial and political systems, a legacy previously often overshadowed by other founding fathers. Today Alexander Hamilton is one of the best-selling biographies of all time, and it has become a cultural phenomenon with its own dedicated musical. 

Besides reading documents about your subject, research can help you understand the world that your subject lived in. 

Try to understand their time and social environment

Many biographies show how their protagonists have had a profound impact on society through their philosophical, artistic, or scientific contributions. But at the same time, it’s worth it as a biographer to make an effort to understand how their societal and historical context influenced their life’s path and work.

An interesting example is Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World . Finding himself limited by a lack of verified detail surrounding William Shakespeare's personal life, Greenblatt, instead, employs literary interpretation and imaginative reenactments to transport readers back to the Elizabethan era. The result is a vivid (though speculative) depiction of the playwright's life, enriching our understanding of his world.

Many readers enjoy biographies that transport them to a time and place, so exploring a historical period through the lens of a character can be entertaining in its own right. The Diary of Samuel Pepys became a classic not because people were enthralled by his life as an administrator, but rather from his meticulous and vivid documentation of everyday existence during the Restoration period.

Once you’ve gotten your hands on as many secondary sources as you can find, you’ll want to go hunting for stories first-hand from people who are (or were) close to your subject.

With all the material you’ve been through, by now you should already have a pretty good picture of your protagonist. But you’ll surely have some curiosities and missing dots in their character arc to figure out, which you can only get by interviewing primary sources.

Interview friends and associates

This part is more relevant if your subject is contemporary, and you can actually meet up or call with relatives, friends, colleagues, business partners, neighbors, or any other person related to them. 

In writing the popular biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson interviewed more than one hundred people, including Jobs’s family, colleagues, former college mates, business rivals, and the man himself.

🔍 Read other biographies to get a sense of what makes a great one. Check out our list of the 30 best biographies of all time , or take our 30-second quiz below for tips on which one you should read next. 

Which biography should you read next?

Discover the perfect biography for you. Takes 30 seconds!

When you conduct your interviews, make sure to record them with high quality audio you can revisit later. Then use tools like Otter.ai or Descript to transcribe them 一 it’ll save you countless hours. 

You can approach the interview with a specific set of questions, or follow your curiosity blindly, trying to uncover revealing stories and anecdotes about your subject. Whatever your method, author and biography editor Tom Bromley suggests that every interviewer arrives prepared, "Show that you’ve done your work. This will help to put the interviewee at ease, and get their best answers.” 

Bromley also places emphasis on the order in which you conduct interviews. “You may want to interview different members of the family or friends first, to get their perspective on something, and then go directly to the main interviewee. You'll be able to use that knowledge to ask sharper, more specific questions.” 

Finally, consider how much time you have with each interviewee. If you only have a 30-minute phone call with an important person, make it count by asking directly the most pressing questions you have. And, if you find a reliable source who is also particularly willing to help, conduct several interviews and ask them, if appropriate, to write a foreword as part of the book’s front matter .

Sometimes an important part of the process is packing your bags, getting on a plane, and personally visiting significant places in your character’s journey.

Visit significant places in their life

A place, whether that’s a city, a rural house, or a bodhi tree, can carry a particular energy that you can only truly experience by being there. In putting the pieces together about someone’s life, it may be useful to go visit where they grew up, or where other significant events of their lives happened. It will be easier to imagine what they experienced, and better tell their story. 

In researching The Lost City of Z , author David Grann embarked on a trek through the Amazon, retracing the steps of British explorer Percy Fawcett. This led Grann to develop new theories about the circumstances surrounding the explorer's disappearance.

Hopefully, you won’t have to deal with jaguars and anacondas to better understand your subject’s environment, but try to walk into their shoes as much as possible. 

Once you’ve researched your character enough, it’s time to put together all the puzzle pieces you collected so far. 

Take the bulk of notes, media, and other documents you’ve collected, and start to give them some order and structure. A simple way to do this is by creating a timeline. 

Create a chronological timeline

It helps to organize your notes chronologically 一 from childhood to the senior years, line up the most significant events of your subject’s life, including dates, places, names and other relevant bits. 

You should be able to divide their life into distinct periods, each with their unique events and significance. Based on that, you can start drafting an outline of the narrative you want to create.  

Draft a story outline 

Since a biography entails writing about a person’s entire life, it will have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You can pick where you want to end the story, depending on how consequential the last years of your subject were. But the nature of the work will give you a starting character arc to work with. 

To outline the story then, you could turn to the popular Three-Act Structure , which divides the narrative in three main parts. In a nutshell, you’ll want to make sure to have the following:

• Act 1. Setup : Introduce the protagonist's background and the turning points that set them on a path to achieve a goal. 
• Act 2. Confrontation : Describe the challenges they encounter, both internal and external, and how they rise to them. Then..
• Act 3. Resolution : Reach a climactic point in their story in which they succeed (or fail), showing how they (and the world around them) have changed as a result. 

Only one question remains before you begin writing: what will be the main focus of your biography?

Think about why you’re so drawn to your subject to dedicate years of your life to recounting their own. What aspect of their life do you want to highlight? Is it their evil nature, artistic genius, or visionary mindset? And what evidence have you got to back that up? Find a central thesis or focus to weave as the main thread throughout your narrative. 

Or find a unique angle

If you don’t have a particular theme to explore, finding a distinct angle on your subject’s story can also help you distinguish your work from other biographies or existing works on the same subject.

Plenty of biographies have been published about The Beatles 一 many of which have different focuses and approaches: 

• Philip Norman's Shout is sometimes regarded as leaning more towards a pro-Lennon and anti-McCartney stance, offering insights into the band's inner dynamics. 
• Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head closely examines their music track by track, shifting the focus back to McCartney as a primary creative force. 
• Craig Brown's One Two Three Four aims to capture their story through anecdotes, fan letters, diary entries, and interviews. 
• Mark Lewisohn's monumental three-volume biography, Tune In , stands as a testament to over a decade of meticulous research, chronicling every intricate detail of the Beatles' journey.

Finally, consider that biographies are often more than recounting the life of a person. Similar to how Dickens’ Great Expectations is not solely about a boy named Pip (but an examination and critique of Britain’s fickle, unforgiving class system), a biography should strive to illuminate a broader truth — be it social, political, or human — beyond the immediate subject of the book. 

Once you’ve identified your main focus or angle, it’s time to write a great story. 

While biographies are often highly informative, they do not have to be dry and purely expository in nature . You can play with storytelling elements to make it an engaging read. 

You could do that by thoroughly detailing the setting of the story , depicting the people involved in the story as fully-fledged characters , or using rising action and building to a climax when describing a particularly significant milestone of the subject’s life. 

One common way to make a biography interesting to read is starting on a strong foot…

Hook the reader from the start

Just because you're honoring your character's whole life doesn't mean you have to begin when they said their first word. Starting from the middle or end of their life can be more captivating as it introduces conflicts and stakes that shaped their journey.

When he wrote about Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild , author Jon Krakauer didn’t open his subject’s childhood and abusive family environment. Instead, the book begins with McCandless hitchhiking his way into the wilderness, and subsequently being discovered dead in an abandoned bus. By starting in medias res , Krakauer hooks the reader’s interest, before tracing back the causes and motivations that led McCandless to die alone in that bus in the first place.

You can bend the timeline to improve the reader’s reading experience throughout the rest of the story too…

Play with flashback 

While biographies tend to follow a chronological narrative, you can use flashbacks to tell brief stories or anecdotes when appropriate. For example, if you were telling the story of footballer Lionel Messi, before the climax of winning the World Cup with Argentina, you could recall when he was just 13 years old, giving an interview to a local newspaper, expressing his lifelong dream of playing for the national team. 

Used sparsely and intentionally, flashbacks can add more context to the story and keep the narrative interesting. Just like including dialogue does…

Reimagine conversations

Recreating conversations that your subject had with people around them is another effective way to color the story. Dialogue helps the reader imagine the story like a movie, providing a deeper sensory experience. 

One thing is trying to articulate the root of Steve Jobs’ obsession with product design, another would be to quote his father , teaching him how to build a fence when he was young: “You've got to make the back of the fence just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know. And that will show that you're dedicated to making something perfect.”

Unlike memoirs and autobiographies, in which the author tells the story from their personal viewpoint and enjoys greater freedom to recall conversations, biographies require a commitment to facts. So, when recreating dialogue, try to quote directly from reliable sources like personal diaries, emails, and text messages. You could also use your interview scripts as an alternative to dialogue. As Tom Bromley suggests, “If you talk with a good amount of people, you can try to tell the story from their perspective, interweaving different segments and quoting the interviewees directly.”

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These are just some of the story elements you can use to make your biography more compelling. Once you’ve finished your manuscript, it’s a good idea to ask for feedback. 

If you’re going to self-publish your biography, you’ll have to polish it to professional standards. After leaving your work to rest for a while, look at it with fresh eyes and self-edit your manuscript eliminating passive voice, filler words, and redundant adverbs. 

Then, have a professional editor give you a general assessment. They’ll look at the structure and shape of your manuscript and tell you which parts need to be expanded on or cut. As someone who edited and commissioned several biographies, Tom Bromley points out that a professional “will look at the sources used and assess whether they back up the points made, or if more are needed. They would also look for context, and whether or not more background information is needed for the reader to understand the story fully. And they might check your facts, too.”  

In addition to structural editing, you may want to have someone copy-edit and proofread your work.

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Importantly, make sure to include a bibliography with a list of all the interviews, documents, and sources used in the writing process. You’ll have to compile it according to a manual of style, but you can easily create one by using tools like EasyBib . Once the text is nicely polished and typeset in your writing software , you can prepare for the publication process.  

In conclusion, by mixing storytelling elements with diligent research, you’ll be able to breathe life into a powerful biography that immerses readers in another individual’s life experience. Whether that’ll spark inspiration or controversy, remember you could have an important role in shaping their legacy 一 and that’s something not to take lightly. 

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A new taylor swift biography for kids hits the bestsellers chart (and it’s on sale for $5).

The paperback tracks the singer's rise to fame, from her small-town beginnings in Pennsylvania to her travels around the globe.

By Tim Chan

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Taylor Swift fans have a few more weeks to wait until her new album is released , but Swifties can spring for a new Taylor-inspired book in the meantime, that’s topping the charts online.

Related Stories

Cailee spaeny remembers staring at the back of taylor swift's head at golden globes: "i couldn't believe this was my life", ryan o'connell to release essay collection (exclusive).

Though it’s written for children ages 8-12, the new book is suitable for fans of all ages, and makes a great gift idea too.

Listed at a suggested manufacturer’s price of $6.99, Amazon has the new Taylor Swift biography on sale for just $5 as of this writing. The 112-page book is available on paperback, hardcover, for Kindle and as an audiobook on Audible (which you can listen to free with a free trial to Audible here ).

While this isn’t an official release from Swift’s camp, the book does hail from publishers Penguin Workshop, whose best-selling Who Was? series tells the stories of “important scientists, artists, writers, athletes, changemakers, and musicians,” in “inviting and digestible packages” for middle-grade readers.

As the publisher notes detail, “Since the release of her self-titled debut album in 2006, Taylor Swift has dominated the music charts, reinvented her sound, won numerous awards, shaken off public criticism, and spoken up for herself and others. Whether you’re a lifelong Swiftie or someone who just loves learning about musicians, this enchanting book will teach you all about the experiences that helped Taylor Swift become the successful superstar many kids and adults looks up to.”

Who Is Taylor Swift? is written by Kirsten Anderson, whose other titles include  Who Is Zendaya?  and  Who Is Kamala Harris? The young adult book also features illustrations from Gregory Copeland, an award-winning artists whose work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators New York, Communication Arts Illustration Annual, and 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide, among others.

The book comes on the heels of an unofficial Taylor Swift fan journal that was released last year, in the middle of the singer’s record-breaking Eras Tour.

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Here's the Release Date for MF DOOM Biography 'The Chronicles of DOOM'

Written by S.H. Fernando, 'The Chronicles of DOOM' follows the life of MF DOOM, who died in 2020.

MF DOOM will receive a full tribute in 352 pages later this year.

Previously announced in 2022, publishing house Astra House Books recently shared in an Instagram post announcing that the long-awaited DOOM biography, The Chronicles Of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast , will be released on Oct. 29.

Written by journalist and author S.H. Fernando ( From the Streets of Shaolin ), the book follows the "rise, fall, redemption, and untimely demise of MF DOOM."

"Broken down into five sections: The Man, The Myth, The Mask, The Music, and The Legend, journalist S. H. Fernando, or SKIZ, chronicles the life of Daniel Dumile Jr., beginning in the house he grew up in Long Beach, NY, into the hip-hop group KMD, onto the stage of his first masked show, through the countless collabs, and across the many different cities Daniel called home," the book description reads.

View this photo on Instagram

The book also incorporates interviews with individuals who knew DOOM closely, with the release perfectly timed to the 20th anniversary of Madvillainy , DOOM's collaborative album with Madlib , and his fourth studio album, Mm..Food . Last year, Madvillainy was celebrated in a separate book via 333 Sound .

It's been 20 years since MF DOOM and Madlib, aka Madvillain, dropped the iconic Madvillainy. This album represents two musical minds melding to form one revered supervillain. Want to unpack the complex layers of Madvillainy? Check out @Willydasquid 's addition to the series. pic.twitter.com/ZBQYnvUfio — 33 1/3 Books (@333books) March 23, 2024

DOOM, who unexpectedly died in 2020 after suffering from angioedema, was honored on Complex Music's Instagram page last month in a post detailing the recent popularity of Madvillainy . In response to the post, Stones Throw Records founder Peanut Butter Wolf shared more details about the album's background . Wolf's house was used to set up shop for recording. The hard work paid off when the label held an all-star Madvillainy release party in 2004.

"The LA release party was at The Fonda (a modest sized venue) and we stacked the bill w/ me, J Rocc, Madlib, Dilla, and Common, besides (the headliner) DOOM because we were afraid it wouldn't sell out," Wolf wrote in the comments section.

"We did a few more shows that month with the same lineup in a few major markets to small but very excited crowds. That was it in terms of promotion, besides doing 3 LOW BUDGET music videos (2 in the same day) that I convinced DOOM into reluctantly doing. It's the first (and only) album on my 28-year-old label to go Gold."

The Chronicles Of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast hits shelves Oct. 29.

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