Abstract
Biographical literature has not yet come of age in the Philippines. True, there is today a relative abundance of major biographies of important personalities in Philippine history. Furthermore, we have various published biographical profiles,sketches and data on major and minor Filipino artists, writers, architects, playwrights, poets, essayists, novelists, painters, inventors, educators, physicians, lawmakers, actors/actresses, movie directors, military generals, guerrillas, economists, engineers, scientists, musicians, journalists, critics and other prominent persons in their fields of endeavor. Except for E. Arsenio Manuel’s, we lack monumental and encyclopedicbiographical literature like the scholarly, well-edited, and excellently-written multivolume Dictionary of American Biography and Who’s Who in America, the Dictionary ofNational Biography, and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography or Webster Biographical Dictionary. Manuel’s Dictionary of Philippine Biography, can still be termed the germof encyclopedic biography in the country.
