by James Boswell

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...