Sunday, May 16, 2004

interesting stuff.....

ok, so this was in reader's almanac for may 16....my brother's birthday as i now remember...i must remember to call him...

It was on this day in 1763 that James Boswell first met Samuel Johnson, the man who would become the subject of his life's work, (books by this author). Boswell was twenty-three years old at the time, bumming around London, going to parties and brothels, and feeling like he was wasting his life. He kept a very detailed diary and wanted to be a writer, but he didn’t know what to write about other than himself. His literary hero was the scholar and writer Samuel Johnson. Boswell had heard that Johnson sometimes stopped by a particular bookshop in London, so Boswell began to spend time there in hopes of running into the great man.

Boswell was drinking tea at the bookshop on this day in 1763, when his friend Thomas Davies told him that Johnson had just come into the shop. Boswell got incredibly nervous when Johnson came into the room. They got into an argument about a man they both knew, and the meeting ended poorly, but Boswell wouldn't give up. He went to a party at Johnson's house a few weeks later, and after the party was over Johnson asked him to stay a little longer to talk. Boswell ended up telling Johnson the story of his life and his struggle to find a vocation. The two men became close friends, and Boswell began to write a book about Johnson that would become his obsession.

Boswell tried to write down everything Johnson did and said in his presence, in order to preserve it for posterity. Boswell's attention occasionally irritated Johnson, and Johnson once said to Boswell, "You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I'm sick of both."

Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson came out in 1791, after Johnson;s death, and it became a bestseller. By 1825, all of Samuel Johnson's writings were out of print, and they didn't come back into print for another hundred years. But Boswell's book about Johnson went through forty-one English editions in the nineteenth century alone. Boswell managed to write a book about Johnson that is more interesting to us today than the books that Johnson wrote.

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