The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Blackwell Critical Biographies)

Although Johnson succeeded in becoming the leading literary figure of his age, he always suffered from a heightened sense of failure. Even after strenuously revising his "Dictionary of the English Language" he felt profoundly dissatisfied with it. In his early years, he relied on his extraordinary powers of mind to distinguish himself from his family and to propel him into broader social and intellectual circles, and in his literary work sought to emulate his hero, Joseph Scaliger, by becoming a citizen of the "European republic of letters". He never felt, however, that he had achieved these dreams, prevented from doing so by financial and personal circumstances - his nervous disorder and the melancholy that attended it. Robert DeMaria describes his subject in terms of Johnson's own personal and professional hopes for himself and aims to get closer to the historical man than any previous study of the complete life and works.