The generation that came of age in the 1980s is widely regarded as the Me Generation. In other words, it's all about ME. What am I doing when I write a biography? Why, I'm writing about someone who influenced ME or is important to ME. Then, when I get a little older and have lived long enough to have experiences of my own to write about, I can quit writing about people who influenced me and instead write about ME. Hence the beginning in the mid 1990s of the memoir-writing phenomenon. Angela's Ashes, which was written in 1995 or so, was probably one of the first of the memoirs - and still one of the best.
Re: the '80s, also an era of big shake-ups in the academic world -- maybe it makes sense that along with the crumbling of the "great men" focus of history (begun by Marxist scholars a couple of decades earlier) you'd find more interest in the lives and doings of "ordinary folk." Were there any such trends in the growing biography genre?
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The generation that came of age in the 1980s is widely regarded as the Me Generation. In other words, it's all about ME. What am I doing when I write a biography? Why, I'm writing about someone who influenced ME or is important to ME. Then, when I get a little older and have lived long enough to have experiences of my own to write about, I can quit writing about people who influenced me and instead write about ME. Hence the beginning in the mid 1990s of the memoir-writing phenomenon. Angela's Ashes, which was written in 1995 or so, was probably one of the first of the memoirs - and still one of the best.
yeah, what "an" said...
*burp*
Re: the '80s, also an era of big shake-ups in the academic world -- maybe it makes sense that along with the crumbling of the "great men" focus of history (begun by Marxist scholars a couple of decades earlier) you'd find more interest in the lives and doings of "ordinary folk." Were there any such trends in the growing biography genre?
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