James Boswell 
Life of Johnson (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) 

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.


 


James Boswell’s
Life of Johnson has ensured that Samuel Johnson remains one of the most intriguing and loved of English literary figures. In it, we not only follow Johnson’s rise to literary preeminence and his development of the
Dictionary, but because the author and biographer were friends we get to relish conversations, jokes, and opinions. We learn the rough edges of Johnson’s personality and gain insider insight into his complexities.

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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.