Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784, English critic, poet, and
author of the first major English dictionary, as well as one of the
enduring pieces of fiction of the century, the moral fable
Rasselas, published the same year (1759) as Voltaire's Candide and often
compared to it. He also wrote Prefaces, Biographical and Critical,
to the Works of the English Poets, better known as The Lives of
The Poets, a series of biographies of English poets including Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Gay. Johnson
is best known through James Boswell's
biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), though another
firsthand biographical account is to be found in the
Anecdotes of his friend and confidante Hester
Thrale Piozzi.
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