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James Boswell (1740-1795) was born the son of an aristocrat (Alexander Boswell, a high-ranking judge who had the title Lord Auchinleck), and as such, had the money to run around Europe acquiring the friends which he wrote about, among them Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rosseau. The majority of his writings are autobiographical, discussing his travels and those he made the travels with; he is perhaps better served by the term "journalist" than the other writers of this century. His initial literary fame comes from his book An Account of Corsica, which details Boswell's interview of the General Pasquale de Paoli, a heroic figure to European liberals. For most of his life, Boswell lived and practiced law in Edinburgh (which, for a writer that made fun of the Scottish as much as he did, might have been a slight error in judgement). His two subsequent books, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) and The Life of Samuel Johnson(1791) both come about from his unlikely friendship with Samuel Johnson. Boswell was perhaps the leading storyteller of his century, as will become evident as we delve into the Life. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/3114/boswell.html |