Samuel Johnson
A Life
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A modern biography of Samuel Johnson that will serve as the definitive work on the legendary British man of letters
In this groundbreaking portrait of Samuel Johnson, David Nokes positions the great thinker in his rightful place as an active force in the Enlightenment, not a mere recorder or performer, and demonstrates how his interaction with life impacted his work. This is the story of how Johnson struggled to define the English language, why he embarked upon such foolhardiness, and where he found the courage to do so. Moving beyond James Boswell's seminal narrative about the life of the preeminent eighteenth-century novelist, literary critic, biographer, editor, essayist, and lexicographer, this biography addresses his life and action through the hitherto unexplored perspectives of such major players as Johnson's wife, Tetty; Hester Thrale, in whose household he resided for seventeen years while working on his annotated Shakespeare; and Frances Barber, the black manservant who in many ways was like a son to Johnson. An in-depth interrogation of the primary sources, particularly the letters, offer surprising insight into Johnson's formative experiences. At last, here's a reading of the great man that will reveal the rightful glory of an enduring work and an incomparable scholar.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Published on the tercentenary of Dr. Johnson's birth comes yet another biography (after two in 2008) of the greatest personality in English literature. Nokes stakes his ground by putting to rest the notion of Johnson's overwhelming fear of his own insanity "a fact" insisted on by Boswell as well as Hester Thrale, a much younger woman in whose husband's household Johnson spent the last 20 years of his life and the woman to whom he entrusted his most intimate confidences. If the massively awkward Johnson had one overarching obsession, it was, in his own withering observation, that too much of his life consisted in time wasted. Nokes, a biographer of Jane Austen and professor at King's College, London, is aware, almost to the point of constraint, that Johnson both invented the modern biography and was himself the subject of the greatest ever written. On the flip side, there is something almost Johnsonian in Nokes's unfashionable but commonsensical approach. For example, in dealing with the infamous padlock belonging to Mrs. Thrale and her teasing journal footnote on it, or in his examination of Johnson's largely unhappy marriage to a woman almost twice his age, Nokes refrains from prurient speculation. 8 pages of b&w photos.
