Biography as a Genre: Plutarch, Boswell, Churchill

Plutarch's Parallel Lives

Plutarch (46–120 AD) invented the biographical genre as an instrument of moral education. “Parallel Lives” — 46 biographies of great Greeks and Romans, written in pairs and with parallel comparison. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Demosthenes and Cicero. Theseus and Romulus.

Plutarch honestly formulates his objective: he writes biography, not history. Biography is about character and morality; history is about events. An anecdote, a small gesture can reveal character better than a great battle. “The smallest act, a brief saying, a joke” — are truer features of a person than his grand deeds.

This principle had a huge influence on Western culture. Plutarch inspired Shakespeare (“Julius Caesar”, “Antony and Cleopatra”, “Coriolanus”), Montaigne, Emerson. Napoleon read “Parallel Lives” and called Plutarch his favorite author.

James Boswell and “The Life of Samuel Johnson”

James Boswell’s “The Life of Samuel Johnson” (1791) is possibly the best biography in Western literature. Boswell spent years recording Johnson’s conversations, observations, utterances. His method: to imitate the reader’s presence next to the subject.

Johnson (1709–1784) was a great lexicographer and critic. But in Boswell’s biography, he is alive: his witticisms (“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”), his gloom, his fears, his kindness. This is the first “realistic” biography in the modern sense — without idealization.

Modern biography has inherited this principle: to show a person in his complexity, not as an icon.

Biography as a School of Leadership

Reading biographies is one of the most practical ways to develop leadership skills. Not because you should “do as Churchill did,” but because biographies provide access to decision-making experience in extreme conditions — experience that cannot be accumulated personally.

Biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Deng Xiaoping — are chronicles of how specific people in specific situations made decisions with limited information. By reading them attentively, you accumulate a “library of decisions” — patterns that can be applied in your own context.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” on Lincoln: a lesson on how to build a coalition of people who hated you. Walter Isaacson on Leonardo — a lesson about curiosity as a professional strategy.

Question for reflection: Whose biography has most influenced your professional mindset? What specific “decision lesson” did you extract from it and put into practice?