A Life Of James Boswell

"Born in Edinburgh, the 'Athens of the North', a Scot who hated living in Scotland and nourished a lifelong love affair with London, Boswell was biographer, journalist, laird, advocate, social lion, incurable rake, lover, life of the party, traveller, steadfast friend, endearing charmer, exhibitionist fool, and drunken sot. In this moving biography, Peter Martin assesses Boswell's literary achievements and uncovers the pulsating and dynamic world he thrived in, from the royal courts and the drawing rooms of fashionable ladies and gentlemen to the fleshpots of London's unsavoury underworld and the chambers of the insane. He also poignantly reveals a man in agony, easily misunderstood, relentlessly plagued by hypochondria or melancholia, buffeted like a straw in the wind by a multitude of anxieties and 'horrible imaginings'."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This complete and unabridged edition is the only complete critical edition in paperback. Samuel Johnson was a poet, essayist, dramatist, and pioneering lexicographer, but his continuing reputation depends less on his literary output than on the fortunate accident of finding an idealbiographer in James Boswell. As Johnson's constant and admiring companion, Boswell was able to record not only the outward events of his life, but also the humour, wit, and sturdy common sense of his conversation. His brilliant portrait of a major literary figure of the eighteenth century,enriched by historical and social detail, remains a monument to the art of biography.

Writer, rake, wit, traveler, and man-about-town, Boswell went everywhere, knew everyone, and never missed an opportunity to enjoy himself. His journals are compulsively self-revealing.

Originally published in 1791, this biography of English writer, Samuel Johnson, has been described as the greatest biography ever written. Differing from others in that era, it contained not just a record of Johnson's public life, but instead painted a vivid portrait of him, and included extensive reports of Johnson's conversation. This edition is an abridged version edited by Charles Grosvenor Osgood.Note: there were no chapters in the main body of the text, so I added some arbitrary ones to break the text up a little bit.