Notoriously and self-confessedly intemperate, Boswell shared with Johnson a huge appetite for life and threw equal energy into recording its every aspect in minute but telling detail. This irrepressible Scotsman was 'always studying human nature and making experiments', and the marvelously vivacious Journals he wrote daily furnished him with first-rate material when he came to write his biography.
Notoriously and self-confessedly intemperate, Boswell shared with Johnson a huge appetite for life and threw equal energy into recording its every aspect in minute but telling detail. This irrepressible Scotsman was 'always studying human nature and making experiments', and the marvelously vivacious Journals he wrote daily furnished him with first-rate material when he came to write his biography.
While Samuel Johnson's dictionary remains a monument of scholarship and his essays and criticism command continuing respect, we owe our knowledge of the man himself to James Boswell's biography. Through a series of detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure with a huge appetite for life, crossing swords with other great 18th-century luminaries, from Garrick and Goldsmith to Burney and Burke - even his long-suffering friend and disciple, James Boswell himself. Yet Johnson had a vulnerable, even tragic, side and anxieties and obsessions haunted his private hours.
Scottish lawyer and essayist, known for his two-volume biography A Life of Samuel Johnson.
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