Life of Samuel Johnson

The most complete edition ever published of the iconic Biography

WIDELY REGARDED as the finest literary biography ever published, James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson reveals a man of outsized appetites and private vulnerabilities, and is the source of much of what we know about one of the towering figures of English literature. This new edition collates and corrects the textual inaccuracies of previous versions, returning to the original manuscript in order to present a definitive edition of this landmark text.

James Boswell (1740—1795) was a lawyer, diarist, and author, best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson.

David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford and the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.