A biographer is a writer who researches and tells the true story of someone else's life. While an autobiography is when you write about your own life, a biography is when someone else writes about yours, and the person doing that writing is the biographer.

Being a good biographer takes serious detective work. You might interview people who knew your subject, dig through old letters and diaries, visit places where they lived, and piece together what really happened from conflicting accounts. A biographer writing about Abraham Lincoln might spend years reading his speeches, studying his law cases, and tracking down stories from people who knew him.

Biographers face an interesting challenge: they need to be fair and accurate, but they also need to make their subject's life interesting to read about. The best biographers help us understand not just what someone did, but why they did it and what it felt like to be them. When you read a great biography, you get to see the world through someone else's eyes, whether that person lived last year or a thousand years ago.

Some biographers spend their whole careers studying one fascinating person. Others write biographies of many different people, always hunting for the next compelling life story to share.