Stuff We Like: Biographicon

If you don't quite make the cut for Wikipedia, don't worry: A new site called Biographicon is happy to host your life story.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on April 08 2008

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

- Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson spent her life as a reclusive poet living in her father’s house in Massachussets. She hardly published a poem during her lifetime, and rarely left the house: Just as she said, she was a nobody.

Following her death, however, her poetry was collected, published, and fawned over, and the once-anonymous Ms. Dickinson is now the subject of countless biographies, plays, and even an extremely thorough Wikipedia page.

If you, however, are a Nobody (at least until your posthumous fame kicks in), don’t worry: There’s a website for you too. Biographicon is the website for those of us who don’t make the Wikipedia cut, featuring biographical details about all sorts of ordinary people and pop cultural footnotes, including not-so-notables such as 80’s pop star Rick Astley (who you’ve probably run into by accident a few times); Max Sparber, a blogger, playwright, ventriloquist, and burlesque show-opener from St. Paul, Minnesota; and David Gulledge, a “quantum biofeedback practitioner” from Kansas City, Missouri.

The site boasts the stories of everyone from 14th century kings and queens to meter maids and janitors – as far as Biographicon is concerned, “everyone has a life story.” So go ahead - tell them yours.

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