Biography in literature

The close relationship between writers and their work relies on ideas that connect human psychology and literature and can be examined through psychoanalytic theory.

[3] Literary biography may address subject-authors whose oeuvre contains a plethora of autobiographical information and who welcome the biographical analysis of their work.

Auden said, "Biographies of writers whether written by others or themselves are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.... His private life is, or should be, of no concern to anybody except himself, his family and his friends.

"[5] Well-received literary biographies include Richard Ellmann's James Joyce and George Painter's Marcel Proust.

[9] This longstanding critical method dates back at least to the Renaissance period,[10] and was employed extensively by Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779–81).

[15] Biographical fiction has its roots in late 19th and early 20th-century novels based loosely on the lives of famous people, but without direct reference to them, such as George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways (1885) and Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence (1919).