Good reasons to read biographies

There is nothing more enlightening and inspiring than reading the life and work of great people. We live in a world built by the genius and creativity of human beings who have had the ability of achieving extraordinary triumphs and it may be instructive to know how their interesting careers have developed. In fact, their priceless lessons of experience can encourage us to start working for greatness on our own. Biographies remind us that history repeats itself. Even if the person we are reading about is unworthy of praise or admiration - we don't read about Martin Luther King or Hitler for the same reason - their real stories can be instructive and valuable.

When it comes to writers, analyzing their lives may help us understand their literary work better. Their experiences usually shape what they create. Let´s take the most intellectual and revolutionary of the British romantic poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley, for instance.

Heir of a rich estate and educated in Eton and Oxford, he gave up everything to liberate humanity from misery. An atheist and anarchist, he was considered a pariah for his lifestyle. His first wife committed suicide by drowning in the Serpentine, in Hyde Park, when he ran away with 16-year-old Mary. Shelley was only 29 when he also drowned during a sudden storm while sailing in Italy. His unrecognizable fisheaten body was found on a beach. They knew it was him because of a volume of Keats' poems in his pocket. The corpse was burnt right there in presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt and his heart was given to his second wife, who would carry it with her in a silken shroud everywhere for the rest of her life. Mary Shelley, best known for her Frankestein, would work tirelessly to edite and promote his poetry.

Apart from getting a glimpse into the minds of these two artists, these are only a few facts which will certainly make us pay attention to certain aspects of their poems and stories we might otherwise miss or consider unimportant. Now we know that his obsession with thunders, water and evil images turned out to be prophetic. Her interest in the supernatural, the weird and the horrible also had an explanation.