Subject Guides: Detailed Research Guide: Biography Resources

Pointers for Biographical Research

You should know the individual's:

Name
Nationality
Year of Birth/Death
Occupation

Family History/Genealogy

If you are researching your ancestry, use the BYU Family History Library page and its resources.

Biography Resources

Use these databases to find brief biographical sketches and references to more extensive accounts located in articles and books on living and deceased persons.

Literature Resource Center (LRC)(Gale) This link opens in a new window Provides access to biographies, bibliographies, critical analysis, and Web resources of authors from every age and literary discipline. Covers more than 90,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,000 of the most-studied authors. Search by Author Name, Title, Genre, Literary Movement or Literary Themes.
Something About the Author (Gale) This link opens in a new window Thousands of illustrated biographical profiles of children's authors and illustrators. Biographical profiles include personal data, addresses, career, awards and honors, writings, sidelights (essay on the author's life and works), adaptations, additional sources and more. Also included are hundreds of specially commissioned autobiography essays.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) This link opens in a new window Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) contains 55,000 biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond, from the earliest times to the year 2002.
World Biographical Information System (WBIS) Online This link opens in a new window World Biographical Information System Online is the most comprehensive biographical database available, providing short biographical information on 4 million people with a historical coverage from the 4th century BC to the present. It contains 3.85 million digital facsimile articles from more than 3,700 reference works, including biographical information on 2.3 million people worldwide. Access to the digitized full-text articles at BYU is limited at present to America, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), and Scandinavia.

Encyclopedia of World Biography

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