The Primary English Encyclopedia: The Heart of the Curriculum, Third Edition
See also anecdotes, biography, genre, first person writing, letters
An autobiography is a first person account written by the subject which may seek to justify, explain or excuse as well as to inform. The boundaries between fact and fiction can become blurred as a writer selects and shapes particular incidents. What we get is one person’s version of what happened and how they felt about it. ‘Some autobiographies come near to being works of fiction and many works of fiction have autobiographical aspects’ (McArthur, 1992, p. 98).
There are not many full length autobiographies for readers under eleven years but two good examples are Roald Dahl’s Boy: Tales of Childhood (Puffin) and Anne Frank’s Diary (Puffin, 1997). A case study of Year 6 children using these is under the ‘first person writing’ entry.
Autobiography is sometimes used in information books on recent history, see for example the In Grandma’s Day series published by Evans in the late 1990s. Each book is organised round the memories of one person’s life in the 1930s and 1940s. Reading about the memories of a real person living through dramatic times (for example as an evacuee in the Second World War) in the twentieth century gives children a different perspective on history. Such texts can also be used in English or in Literacy Time to compare the features of first and third person accounts. For the mature ten year old and older children, the autobiographical novel based on the diaries of Tatjana Wassiljewa, A Hostage to War (Collins), is a powerful account of a young girl’s courage during the famine caused by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The first person voice of the diaries (translated by Anna Trenter) speaks movingly of hunger, fear and the ceaseless toil of Tatjana as she faces work on the farms and factories of the Third Reich.
Where we want children to compare autobiography with biography, Roald Dahl’s autobiography, Boy, might be compared with Chris Powling’s short biography of Roald Dahl in Evans’ Tell Me About Writers series.
Fictional autobiographies use the first person ‘voice’ as a literary device. There are always reasons for the choice of ‘voice’. It may suit the author’s purpose to show a set of events very powerfully from one character’s viewpoint or to give an impression of spontaneity. Far from being easy to write in the first person, it is in fact a very sophisticated kind of writing which has to be carefully crafted to succeed. In The Midnight Fox (Puffin, 1980), for example, Betsy Byars wants the readers to share the intensity of the urban boy’s experiences in the countryside. The use of Tyke’s ‘voice’ in The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler by Gene Kemp (Penguin, 1979) gives the narrative energy and immediacy and draws the reader in more than a third person account might have done. Letters are an important kind of first person writing that can be a powerful literary device. They are used, to great effect, in Simon James’ Dear Greenpeace (Walker Books, 1991) for children of about 6–8 years and, for older children, in Beverley Cleary’s Dear Mr Henshaw (Puffin, 1983) and Harry Horse’s The Last Polar Bears (Viking, 1993). Children whose roots are in countries far away from where they live often see letters as a way of bridging the distance between friends and relatives. For children of about nine plus, Jazeera’s Journey by Lisa Bruce (Methuen, 1991) shows how letters can link lives, in this case the lives of Jazeera in England and her grandmother in Asia.
Reading books like those mentioned above can be a helpful starting point for children’s own writing (see more about this under ‘first person writing’).
McArthur, Tom (ed.) 1992 The Oxford Companion to the English Language Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mallett, Margaret (1997) First Person Reading and Writing in the Primary Years Sheffield: NATE.
This is the complete article, containing 645 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Autobiography
