Portal:Biography

The Biography Portal

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts (education, work, relationships, and death), biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents the subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of the subject's personality.

Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Biographical works in diverse media—from literature to film—form the genre known as biography.

An autobiography is written by the subject him or herself, sometimes with a collaborator. An authorized biography is written with the cooperation of family and heirs, or of the subject if alive.

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Featured biography

Jocelin or Jocelyn (died 1199) was a 12th-century Cistercian monk and cleric who became the fourth Abbot of Melrose before becoming Bishop of Glasgow, Scotland. He was probably born in the 1130s, and in his teenage years became a monk of Melrose Abbey. He rose in the service of Abbot Waltheof, and by the time of the short abbacy of Waltheof's successor Abbot William, Jocelin had become prior. Then in 1170 Jocelin himself became abbot, a position he held for four years. Jocelin was responsible for promoting the cult of the emerging Saint Waltheof, and in this had the support of Enguerrand, Bishop of Glasgow.

His Glasgow connections and political profile were already well-established enough that in 1174 Jocelin succeeded Enguerrand as Glasgow's bishop. As Bishop of Glasgow, he was a royal official. In this capacity he travelled abroad on several occasions, and performed the marriage ceremony between King William the Lion and Ermengarde de Beaumont, later baptising their son, the future King Alexander II. Among other things, he has been credited by modern historians as the founder of the burgh of Glasgow and initiator of the Glasgow fair, as well as being one of the greatest literary patrons in medieval Scotland, commissioning the Life of St Waltheof, the Life of St Kentigern and the Chronicle of Melrose. (Read more...)

Selected portrait

Buzz Aldrin (born January 20, 1930 as Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr.) is an American pilot and astronaut. He was the Lunar Module Pilot for the Apollo 11 mission, the first lunar landing. He was the second person to set foot on the Moon and was the second human ever to step on an extraterrestrial world. Here, he walks on the surface of the Moon near the leg of the Lunar Module. (Read more...)

Photograph taken by Neil A. Armstrong, mission commander, with a 70mm lunar surface camera. Source:NASA

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On this day – February 22

Births

• 1732 - George Washington, 1st President of the United States. (d. 1799) (pictured)
• 1788 - Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (d. 1860)
• 1857 - Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, English founder of the Boy Scouts (d. 1941)
• 1892 - Edna St. Vincent Millay, American writer (d. 1950)
• 1962 - Steve Irwin, Australian herpetologist (d. 2006)
• 1975 - Drew Barrymore, American actress

Deaths

• 1512 - Amerigo Vespucci, Italian merchant and explorer (b. 1454)
• 1674 - Jean Chapelain, French writer (b. 1595)
• 1797 - Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr von Münchhausen, German officer and adventurer (b. 1720)
• 1987 - Andy Warhol, American artist, director, and writer (b. 1928)

Did you know...

• ... that Poet Ali Haider accepted the Sufi position of Hazrat Mai Safoora Qadiriyya after watching her famous miracle of praying Salah in Ravi river ?
• ... that Queen Victoria rescued Dash the Dog from a carriage accident?
• ... that Dutch merchant Hendrik Pieter Nicolaas Muller established the Oost-Afrikaansche Compagnie (East African Trading Company) in 1882, which was to be mainly successful in West Africa, and is a trade mark for quality in Liberia to this day.
• ... that Ronald Skirth, an artilleryman in the British Army during World War One, deliberately mistargeted British guns to prevent the loss of enemy life?
• 
  ... that botanist Thomas Frederic Cheeseman (pictured) had a wide range of interests: he also described a few species of marine gastropods?
• ... former Regimental Sergeant Major Harry Lapwood was known as having the loudest voice in the New Zealand House of Representatives?
• ... that in 1951, Bulgarian politician and exile G. M. Dimitrov helped found the first Bulgarian NATO company?
• ... that Edith Killgore Kirkpatrick published a short book of favorite songs titled Louisiana Let's Sing in honor of her husband Claude's unsuccessful candidacy for Governor of Louisiana in 1963?
• ... that canal engineer Hugh Henshall was both pupil of and brother-in-law to James Brindley, the famous canal architect of the Industrial Revolution?
• 
  ... that Jagadguru Rāmabhadrācārya (pictured), a Hindu religious leader who has been blind since the age of two months and never used Braille or any other aid to learn or compose, can speak 22 languages.

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See also: Biographies of living persons • Manual of Style (biographies)

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