Ocean State Libraries

In Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality, in a biography to which we owe much of our knowledge of the man himself. Through a series of richly detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure, vigorously engaging and fencing with great contemporaries such as Garrick, Goldsmith, Burney and Burke, and of course with Boswell himself. Yet anxieties...

This historical novel set during the eighteenth century recounts the tumultuous final years of famed English lexicographer and poet Samuel Johnson. In 1764, Britain's greatest man of letters-the writer of the first English dictionary-shut himself in his room and refused to come out. Exhausted from working on an edition of Shakespeare's plays, Samuel Johnson had fallen into a deep depression. He refused to eat and only opened his door to cry out incomprehensible...