The Life of Johnson

by James Boswell

Overview

Samuel Johnson is famously known for single-handedly creating the first recognized dictionary of the English language, just one of many his many renowned accomplishments. The biography of this remarkable writer, dramatist, poet, and moralist was penned by his friend, James Boswell, in 1791. An immediate success upon its publication, this work has come to be considered the greatest biography produced in the English language, and has earned Boswell the reputation as a wonderfully sharp and methodical artist of the biography. The wealth of detail and charming characterization of Johnson can be attributed to Boswell's diligent journal-keeping and excellent memory. He often initiated psychologically probing conversations to explore Johnson’s character. He also collected a mass of letters to and about Johnson, and worked diligently to authenticate anecdotes about the man. The result of these efforts is a charming and accurate portrait of a literary idol. This edition follows the popular abridgment of Charles Grosvenor Osgood.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781420967302
Publisher:	Digireads.com Publishing
Publication date:	03/20/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (29 October 1740 - 19 May 1795) was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson, which the modern Johnsonian critic Harold Bloom has claimed is the greatest biography written in the English language.

Boswell's surname has passed into the English language as a term (Boswell, Boswellian, Boswellism) for a constant companion and observer, especially one who records those observations in print. In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes affectionately says of Dr. Watson, who narrates the tales, "I am lost without my Boswell."

Editorial Reviews

"I don't need to tell you what a splendid service Oxford performs by having the complete Life available inexpensively and with Chapman's deft annotations and Rogers's smart and useful introduction."—Alexander Poffit, University of North Texas

"...An elegant study of currents and of undercurrents in the travellers' separate accounts of their journey to the Western Islands. Reading this book, we realize better than before what Johnson and Boswell, separately and together, were so passionately in quest of...be grateful for the imaginative light [the book] throws on the mythic-seeming journey and on those mythic-seeming voyagers whose travels still haunt some of our waking dreams."—The Albion

From the Publisher