Form and Purpose in Boswell's Biographical Works


Book Description

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.







Boswell's Presumptuous Task


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."




Samuel Johnson


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.




The Club


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.




An Account of Corsica


Book Description







The Face of Water


Book Description

In this dazzling reconsideration of the language of the Old and New Testaments, acclaimed scholar and translator of classical literature Sarah Ruden argues that the Bible’s modern translations often lack the clarity and vitality of the originals. Singling out the most famous passages, such as the Genesis creation story, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Beatitudes, Ruden reexamines and retranslates from the Hebrew and Greek, illuminating what has been misunderstood and obscured in standard English translations. By showing how the original texts more clearly reveal our cherished values, Ruden gives us an unprecedented understanding of what this extraordinary document was for its earliest readers and what it can still be for us today.




Samuel Johnson


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.