Life of Samuel Johnson

by James Boswell

Overview

Abridged,with an Introduction,by Bergen Evans,The Powell-Hill text

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783986778453
Publisher:	Phoemixx Classics Ebooks
Publication date:	12/24/2021
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1333
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

James Boswell (1740-1795) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland where he received a formal education in English, math and Latin. He attended the University of Edinburgh and University of Glasgow before traveling to London where he lived for several years. While studying law, he had a chance meeting with the English writer Samuel Johnson. After establishing a good rapport, Boswell would go on to produce the biography The Life of Samuel Johnson, which would become his crowning creative achievement.

Editorial Reviews

The effect of [this] biography is also similar to that of War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Just as those novels provide a social history of Russia, so the Life serves as a portrait of late eighteenth-century England. On the title page Boswell claimed that his book exhibits “a View of Literature and Literary Men in Great-Britain, for Near Half a Century,” and the book has shaped posterity’s view of Johnson’s literary world quite as much as it has created an image of Johnson himself.”

Masterpieces of World Literature

Nothing comparable to [The Life of Samuel Johnson] had existed. Nor has anything comparable been written since, because that special union of talents, opportunities, and subject matter has never been duplicated.”

American literary critic and biographer Walter Jackson Bate