Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson came to London from Lichfield with a play in his pocket and no money, wrote for the magazines for years, and became the dominant literary figure of his age: the Dictionary of 1755, compiled almost alone in nine years, the moral essays of the Rambler, the philosophical tale Rasselas, written in a week to pay for his mother’s funeral, the Preface to Shakespeare and the Lives of the Poets. Boswell’s Life preserved his talk and made him the best-known Englishman of the century. He is read for the prose, the judgment, and the sense of a mind at full stretch.