Definition authorized biography contract

Biographies are grouped into two categories: biographies written with the subject’s permission and cooperation, aka authorized biographies, and biographies written without the subject’s permission and cooperation, aka known as unauthorized biographies.

The former tends to suggest a puffy publicity piece. The later tends to suggest a forbidden sense of controversy, like a “kiss and tell” book written by a former employee, paramour, or confidante of the biography’s subject.

Definition authorized biography contract

In the words of Kitty Kelly, the author of the controversial biography “Oprah,” the label unauthorized biography “sounds so nefarious, kind of like breaking and entering. But that’s what biography is.

It does break and enter a life.”

And with that sense of transgression or trespass, also comes a few significant legal risks that authors of unauthorized biographies might encounter — like a lawsuit for libel, invasion of privacy or misappropriation o