Biography writing: essence, structure, and types

A biography is a literary genre with a fictional essence which recounts the story of a person's life. Due to its distinct features, biography has attained literary, historical, and sociological prominence and function. The popularity and development of the genre, together with its diverse categories, are the culmination of the process of the recognition of a national and individual identity during the Iranian constitutionalism. The present study endeavours to explore analytically the background and development of the diverse categories of the genre as well as their structural and literary similarities, dissimilarities, and confluence. Meanwhile, the function of the biography, the biographer's literary and scholarly status, biographer's privacy, along with the prevailing impediments and obstacles, are critically investigated. A part of this study is allotted to the analysis of the biographies and autobiographies of Dr. Abdolhossein Zarkoub, Kamiar Abedi, Mehdi Akhavan-e-Saless, and Behazin (Mahmoud Etenadzadeh). Since each of the above-mentioned personages has their particular style and manner of biography writing, the structure and content of their works are utterly dissimilar.