International Biographer's Day
The two-volume book The Life of Samuel Johnson, which was released 28 years after their meeting, according to many literary critics became the greatest biography in English, popular and widely read up to now.
Typically a person engaged in the collection and processing of material spends more than a year and even several decades, before he is able to arrange his work into a book. This is the second person, after the biographee’s family and close friends, who is aware of the main events, personality, habits and other life details of the story central character.
Greek philosophers Plutarch and Suetonius can be recognized as the first biographers. Well-known are names of the first publishers and biographers of Alexander Pushkin - Paul Annenkov, of Leo Tolstoy - Pavel Biryukov, and life of Fyodor Tyutchev was described by Ivan Aksakov.
Foreign authors also successfully worked in this genre, for instance Stefan Zweig, Voltaire, Romain Rolland, Henri Troyat.
Today, many famous people do not use services of experts in this field, and prefer to record their life on their own. Thus, bookshelves are full of biographies of young singers, actors and writers.
