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CHAPTER I

A TALK ABOUT BIOGRAPHY


No doubt most of you think biography dull reading. You would much rather
sit down with a good story. But have you ever thought what a story is?
It is nothing but a bit of make-believe biography.

Let us see, in the first place, just what biography means. It is formed
from two Greek words, "bios," meaning life, and "graphein," meaning to
write: life-writing. In other words, a biography is the story of the
life of some individual. Now what the novelist does is to write the
biographies of the people of his story; not usually from the cradle to
the grave, but for that crucial period of their careers which marked
some great success or failure; and he tries to make them so life-like
and natural that we will half-believe they are real people, and that the
things he tells about really happened. Sometimes, to accomplish this, he
even takes the place of one of his own characters, and tells the story
in the first person, as Dickens does in "David Copperfield." That is
called autobiography, which is merely a third Greek word, "autos,"
meaning self, added to the others. An automobile, for instance, is a
self-moving vehicle. So autobiography is the biography of oneself. The
great aim of the novelist is, by any means within his power, to make his