The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. PDF Download

Author: John Hawkins
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 636

View

Book Description

Author: James Boswell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192835314
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 1540

View

Book Description
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.

Author: Peter Martin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300093124
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 644

View

Book Description
"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

Author: James Boswell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 478

View

Book Description

Author: Adam Sisman
Publisher: HarperPerennial
ISBN: 9780007234295
Category : Authors, Scottish
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
With great wit, Sisman here tells the story of Boswell's presumptuous task--the making of the greatest biography of all time. Sisman traces the friendship between Boswell and Samuel Johnson, his mentor, and provides a fascinating account of Boswell's seven-year struggle to write "The Life of Samuel Johnson."

Author: Leo Damrosch
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300244967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 498

View

Book Description
Prize-winning biographer Leo Damrosch tells the story of “the Club,” a group of extraordinary writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavern In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.” In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth-century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.

Author: James Boswell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1424

View

Book Description

Author: Jeffrey Meyers
Publisher: Oldcastle Books Ltd
ISBN: 1904915507
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 543

View

Book Description
Jeffrey Meyers tells the extraordinary story of Samuel Johnson one of the most illustrious figures of English literary tradition. Johnson was famous as a poet, novelist, biographer, essayist, critic, editor, lexicographer, conversationalist and larger than life personality. After nine years of work Johnson's, 'A dictionary of the English Language, was published in 1755. He overcame great adversity to achieve success. 'The Struggle' is a masterful portrait of a brilliant and tormented figure.

Author: Peter Martin
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0297856162
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

View

Book Description
The first new biography for a generation of one of the great figures of English literature Poet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer, critic, conversationalist and wit, Dr Johnson is one of the great figures of English literature, perhaps the most quoted English writer after Shakespeare. Our view of Johnson has been overwhelmingly shaped by James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, the most famous biography in the English language. But invaluable as Boswell is as a source, he should not be the last word. This new biography illuminates the Johnson that Boswell never knew: the awkward youth, the unsuccessful schoolmaster, the eccentric marriage, his early years in London in the 1740s scratching a living, the epic struggle to produce the Dictionary. Very much the outsider, rather than the supremely confident dispenser of robust common sense. Using material unknown to previous biographers, Peter Martin describes the psychological knife-edge on which Johnson felt he lived, caused by his severe melancholia and his physical diseases. He explores Johnson's role in the publishing and printing world of the time and he reveals how important women were to Johnson throughout his life. The Samuel Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable and sympathetic figure than the one that Boswell so memorably portrayed.

Author: Robert McCrum
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781903385838
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
Beginning in 1611 with the King James Bible and ending in 2014 with Elizabeth Kolbert's 'The Sixth Extinction', this extraordinary voyage through the written treasures of our culture examines universally-acclaimed classics such as Pepys' 'Diaries', Charles Darwin's 'The Origin of Species', Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and a whole host of additional works --