James Boswell was born in Edinburgh in 1740, the son of a prominent Ayrshire landowner and Scottish judge. He moved to London with the hopes of meeting the great figures of the day, and by chance met Samuel Johnson in the parlor of a Covent Garden bookshop in 1763. Although Boswell and Johnson only spent about three months together after their first encounter, Boswell had by this time fallen under Johnson's influence. However, it was the experience that they shared on their hundred-day trip to Scotland's Western Isles in 1773 that gave Boswell his best opportunity to see his friend in an environment in which he would learn even more about him than in the London coffeehouses. Boswell died in May 1795.