The Life of Samuel Johnson

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James Boswell's "The Life of Samuel Johnson" is perhaps the best-known biography in English literature, and it marked a turning point in the art of biography writing. Through Boswell's prose Johnson comes across as a wholly believable man. We do not get just an account of his life, but feel we have been there with Boswell and seen and heard Johnson for ourselves. Boswell revolutionized the art of biography, and was well aware that he was doing so. At the time he was writing there were two traditions of biography, the ethical (deriving from Plutarch's 'Parallel Lives'), in which incidents were shown for the moral instruction of the reader, and the anecdotal (deriving from Xenophon's 'Memorabilia of Socrates'), in which incidents were shown for their own sake, without moral lessons being attached