“Celebrity Bio Blogs: Hagiography, Pathography, and Perez Hilton”

[para. 1]: "In "The Case Against Biography," Michael Holroyd plays devil's advocate to all those who dismiss, demean, or devalue the genre. "First," he announces, "comes the biographer who writes about the very famous, either the living or the warm dead. This class of biographer keeps company with film stars, murderers and the royal family." "They trade on other people's miseries, dine out on their tragedies, and make the trivial perpetually portentous" (4-5). Originating from the eighteenth century, they remain "the most newsworthy biographers of our own day and perhaps the easiest to attack. Fat sitting ducks" (4-5). Celebrity biographers are indeed everywhere, plying their trade in books, in tabloid newspapers and gossip magazines, on entertainment television shows, and, most recently, online. From the mid-1990s, when the internet began its steady domination of popular culture to the present, websites like People.com, etonline.com and biography.com have proliferated. Devoted to the public and professional as well as the private and personal lives of celebrities, they can now comfortably be referred to as a genre in their own right: online celebrity biography."