Boswell's Life of Johnson

About the book

Boswell constructs his portrait of Samuel Johnson through remembered encounters, reported conversations, correspondence, and accounts of earlier years. Literary work and public reputation share space with meals, visits, travel, argument, religious anxiety, generosity, and personal difficulty. Johnson's voice is a central attraction, but Boswell's questions and reactions also make the biographer an active presence in the scene. Their unequal yet enduring relationship helps give intellectual exchanges the texture of lived company. This is Charles Grosvenor Osgood's abridgement, which reduces letters, commentary, and other material while retaining a selection intended to represent Johnson's mind and milieu. Readers therefore meet the biography through an explicit editorial selection, with its strongest moments often occurring where a sharp opinion and an ordinary social situation illuminate one another.

• Conversation
• Friendship and observation
• Literary life

Why read it

For a selected route into a biography whose conversations make intellectual character vivid in the setting of everyday company.

Abridged and edited by Charles Grosvenor Osgood