Some 300 years after his birth in 1709, Samuel Johnson is remembered for having had a very successful biographer and for being eminently quotable. ... Martin wisely has made short periodical essays ...

Although he’s best remembered as a lexicographer today, Johnson was actually something of a literary multitasker. As a journalist, he wrote for an early periodical called The Gentlemen’s Magazine.

But London proved to be Johnson’s salvation. He made a connection with the editor of the popular Gentleman’s Magazine and started to earn a living by hackwork. Soon enough his reputation was ...

Mr. Keizer is an author and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review. If resolution makers wanted a patron saint, they could do worse than Samuel Johnson (1709 to ...

James Boswell is a hard act to follow. His Life of Johnson, written at close range after more hours in pubs and miles of travel with his eccentric subject than most could have withstood, is detailed, ...

Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century writer and lexicographer, was not only a great man but the subject of the greatest of all biographies. It's mainly due to Boswell's "Life of Johnson" (1791) that ...

So is Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” which is the first inarguably modern novel. The third is James Boswell’s “The Life of Samuel Johnson,” the earliest recognizable modern biography.