James Boswell (1740-1795) was a young, funloving, aristocratic, would-be man-abouttown when he came to London from his native Scotland in 1762. He soon became a compulsive writer, beginning a detailed journal in which he recorded virtually every significant event or conversation of his daily life. Among the many London celebrities the 22-year-old Boswell sought out was the 53-year-old literary giant Samuel Johnson (1709-84), whom he met in May 1763. The two then began a friendship that lasted until Johnson’s death. Outside of his journals (discovered in the twentieth century) and his writings about Johnson, Boswell’s best known literary work is An Account of Corsica (1768), in which he describes the Italian island and its struggles for independence from Genoa. In 1773, Boswell and Johnson traveled to the Scottish highlands and the Hebrides, a voyage that Boswell later immortalized in the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Based on his (heavily revised) diary of the trip, the Journal was published in 1785, the year after Johnson’s death, and is considered by some to be Boswell’s masterpiece. The Life of Samuel Johnson, regarded by many as the finest biography ever written, has given the world an unforgettable portrait of Samuel Johnson.
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