What Is a Thematic Biography?

A thematic biography is not merely a biography, which is an account of the events of a particular person’s life. One could easily write a biography without ever engaging in the more intimate, more interesting questions a thematic biography entails.

Defining a Thematic Biography

A thematic biography is a description and recounting of the life of the subject, but with an overarching emphasis on some other issue. The concept of a thematic biography is a type of writing that doesn’t stick to facts alone, but seeks to incorporate facts in proving a predetermined point of view.

• The facts at hand might be emphasized in such a way as to make a traditional historical view look quite different from how it’s usually presented.
• The point of some thematic biographies is to present history in a different or unusual way, to get people familiar with a set of events thinking to think about those events and reevaluate what it is they thought they knew.
• It’s also a means of interesting younger people in the subject of the thematic biography, since many of that age set may believe history, and biographies, are a dull and boring subject. 
• The writer may also incorporate some of his own interpretations into a thematic biography, some of which may be controversial enough to get people talking (and presumably buying his book.)

A thematic biography is the recounting of the historical events of a person’s life from a definite point of view that usually changes the traditional interpretations of how that life is seen.

An Example of a Thematic Biography

If one were to write a thematic biography on Abraham Lincoln, one would be overwhelmed by the choices of one could do to make a cohesive thematic biography. That’s because Lincoln’s life touched on so many different political, social, and personal issues, so the choice of themes is pretty much limitless.

• One might pick Lincoln's  assassination as the theme that would overarch the presentation of the facts and details of his life. However, the fact of his murder at the hands of a southern assassin would simply signal the end of the essay. After all, who doesn’t know Lincoln was assassinated, and where and when it happened?

• If one were to use the manner and mode of Lincoln’s death as an overarching theme, that would rearrange and recolor the events of Lincoln’s life. Certain facts might be emphasized, and others, diminished, all to the point of proving the central thesis.

Using Honest Abe as a Theme

Why was Lincoln assassinated? John Wilkes Booth, a popular actor of the day, shot Lincoln in a Washington, DC theater. Booth allegedly did so because of Lincoln winning the Civil War against the South, and Booth, a southerner, was in anguish at the pain, confusion, and loss to the states he loved so dearly.

These facts are not a thematic biography. In order to write a thematic biography, you'd need to come up with a central thesis. In using the example of Lincoln’s assassination, one could look at that fact several ways. One theme might be that Lincoln, by his own actions, brought the assassination on himself by how he allegedly humiliated the South during and after the Civil War.

If this were the central theme for the biography, the writer would purposely emphasis certain facts of Lincoln’s actions and deeds that would prove that thesis.

If, on the other hand, the central thesis is that Lincoln’s behavior and how he ran the Civil War could not have been any different if the war was to be won by the Union Army, and thus, there would’ve been no way to stop Booth from following through with the assassination, one would emphasis certain facts in a different way.

A thematic biography presents a case, almost as if it were a legal case, in a way that proves the contention of the author, as expressed in the central thesis of the writing.

Thematic Biography: Fiction or Nonfiction?

The question remains if such a thematic biography can be considered to be nonfiction. Pundits who are opposed to the themes proven or disproven by a particular work might call the author’s contentions “fiction,” but that wouldn’t necessarily be true.