

The Life of Samuel Johnson
Author: James Boswell
Narrator: Bernard Mayes
Unabridged: 54 hr 39 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 12/01/1998
Categories: Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography
Author: James Boswell
Narrator: Bernard Mayes
Unabridged: 54 hr 39 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 12/01/1998
Categories: Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
“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