The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Volume One. James Boswell.

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Volume One
James Boswell
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc. 1949 (1792)

Why read it? The most famous biography in English literature of one of the most quoted people in the English language. Samuel Johnson was "bigger than life" because James Boswell kept voluminous and meticulous notes. He recorded even trivial details about his famous friend's interaction with people. Boswell often "stage-managed" encounters in order to write about the outcome. The reader is literally "there" in the England of Johnson's day. You see the streets and the inns and the people who were foils for Johnson's ideas. A few other people, notably Boswell's wife, are also recorded making memorable statements about England's most famous scholar.

From the book:

Boswell: "To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others...is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me, a presumptuous task."

Boswell: "And he will be seen as he really was; for I profess to write, not his panegyric, which must be all praise, but his life: which great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect."

Boswell: "...but in every picture there should be shade as well as light, and when I delineate him without reserve, I did what he himself recommended both by his precept and his example."

Boswell: "What I consider as the peculiar value of the following work is the quantity it contains of Johnson's conversation: which is universally acknowledge to have been eminently instructive and entertaining."

Bowell quoting Plutarch: "Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievements that men's virtues or vices may be best discerned: but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battles."

Boswell: "In following so very eminent a man from his cradle to his grave, every minute particular, which can throw light on the progress of his mind, is interesting."