1804 The Life of Samuel Johnson

Description

Folding Plates, Illustrated, Leather Binding, Uncommon

Boswell's biography of Samuel Johnson is often claimed to be the greatest biography written in English, and the text played an important role in the development of the modern genre of biography. Whilst Boswell's personal acquaintance with his subject began rather later in 1763, when Johnson was fifty four years old, Boswell covered the entirety of Johnson's life by means of additional research. The most admired and best remembered portions of the book though are Boswell's first-hand accounts of Johnson from the last twenty-one years of the subject's life. However, the text has not escaped criticism. Boswell took many critical liberties with Johnson's life, making various changes to quotations, and even censoring comments made by the writer. Nonetheless, modern biographers have found Boswell's biography an important source of information on Johnson and his times. Collated, complete with a portrait frontispiece of Johnson, and two folding facsimiles. This edition includes additional unpublished letters and notes to previous volumes. Uniformly bound in speckled calf.