  Over the years many have written biographies of Einstein. They all based
their biographies on primary sources, archival material: memories and letters
of people who were in contact with Einstein, Einstein's own recollections;
interviews that Einstein had given over the years, and letters of Einstein to
his friends - youth friends like Marcel Grossman and Michele Besso and later
friends and colleagues like Heinrich Zangger; and especially his love letters
with Mileva Mari\'c. One can demarcate between two types of biographies,
namely, Documentary biographies, and, Non-documentary biographies.
Non-documentary biographies were written by people who based themselves on
documentary biographies and on other non-documentary biographies. Documentary
biographies were written by people who knew Einstein personally, and received
information from him and from other people who were in personal contact with
him. This type can be further divided into two subgroups: books that were
written while Einstein was still alive, and books that were written after his
death. Among the first group there were some biographies that Einstein
considered to be more reliable, others he thought were less reliable, and still
other biographies which he considered to be almost pure imagination. I will
demonstrate that relying on primary sources and "documentary" does not
necessarily mean "reliable".
