The Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell
The Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell
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The Life of Samuel Johnson

Author: James Boswell

Narrator: Bernard Mayes

Unabridged: 54 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/01/1998


Synopsis

James Boswell forever changed the genre of biography when he painstakingly transformed a scholarly profusion of detail into a perceptive, lifelike portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson.James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson reveals a man of outsized appetites and private vulnerabilities and is the source of much of what we know about one of the towering figures of English literature. Boswell spent a great deal of time with Johnson in his final years and from his scrupulously accurate memory and copious journal was able to faithfully record the brilliance and wit of Dr. Johnson’s conversation. Boswell’s aim and achievement was completeness; no detail was too small for him. On this point Dr. Johnson remarked to him, “There is nothing, sir, too little for so little a creature as man.” Boswell’s thirst for detail makes this indisputably the finest of many biographies of Johnson.This biography gained its unique place in literary history from the fact that its style was revolutionary. The usual style of biographers of that era was to record dry facts from the subject’s public life only. Boswell differed by incorporating actual conversations of Dr. Johnson, which Boswell had previously noted down in journals, and by including many more details of personal life. The result revolutionized the genre.For both its subject and its style, The Life of Samuel Johnson is still popular with modern critics and students of the history of English thought and of English literature.

About James Boswell

James Boswell (1740–1795), Scottish man of letters, was born in Edinburgh and studied law in Glasgow, but his true ambition was literary fame and the company of great men. In 1760 he went to London where he met Samuel Johnson. After several literary successes, he began his acknowledged masterpiece, The Life of Samuel Johnson.

About Bernard Mayes

Bernard Mayes is a teacher, administrator, corporate executive, broadcaster, actor, dramatist, and former international commentator on US culture. He is best known for his readings of historical classics.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul on July 20, 2013

This is a book which is not about a thing but is the thing itself. I think there’s a complicated German philosophical term for that. In the history books they will tell you Samuel Johnson is dead these 200 years, but I say No Sir. He’s alive, here, right here. He’s walking and talking and wringing t......more

Goodreads review by Roy on May 08, 2024

The Life of Samuel Johnson is many things: charming, witty, vivacious, absorbing, edifying, beautiful; part philosophy and part history, with some politics and religion on the side. It is ironic, then, that one of the few things it most definitely is not is a biography. James Boswell was not intere......more

Goodreads review by W.D. on February 27, 2020

Whew! Nearly four months, already? The thing about insanely long books like this one (1300pp of tiny, tiny type!) is that if you have at most an hour or two to read each day, you really do live with them over time and they become almost a part of the family. You have your little spats with them, the......more

Goodreads review by Justin on March 21, 2014

I might be too exhausted from reading the thing to write a proper review. Just holding it takes a toll on my sub-ganymedic upper body. The first thing to note is that I'd much rather read more Boswell than read more of Johnson's letters. Boswell's writing is like that of eighteenth century philosoph......more

Goodreads review by Douglas on November 27, 2014

I recently included a "bucket book" in my line-up of books I am reading. These are books I really ought to have read by this time in my life, but which, alas, I have not. This book, The Life of Samuel Johnson, was the first in this roster that I have completed. Having done so, it continues to strike......more


Quotes

“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.” Walter Jackson Bate, American literary critic and biographer