Oct. 29: James Boswell,

James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck, was a Scottish biographer and diarist, born in Edinburgh. He is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure ... Wikipedia

Born: October 29, 1740, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Died: May 19, 1795, London, United Kingdom

Spouse: Margaret Montgomerie (m. 1769–1789)

Nationality: Scottish, British

Quotes

I, who have no sisters or brothers, look with some degree of innocent envy on those who may be said to be born to friends.

A good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.

He who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.

James Boswell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on this day in 1740.

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
―from THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON (1791)

The most celebrated English biography is a group portrait in which extraordinary man paints the picture of a dozen more. At the centre of a brilliant circle which included Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, Fanny Burney and even George III, Boswell captures the powerful, troubled and witty figure of Samuel Johnson, who towers above them all. Yet this is also an intimate picture of domestic life, which mingles the greatest talkers of a talkative age with the hero’s humbler friends in a picture which is, before all things, humane. As a young man about London, James Boswell was obsessed by literature, and, on a fateful day in 1763, he attached himself with unswerving tenacity to the dominant literary figure of his age—the splendidly rotund, articulate, and humane Dr Samuel Johnson. What followed was the most famous of friendships between writers and the bais for the remarkable documentation contained in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the greatest and most compelling of all biographies. READ more here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/the-life-of-samuel-jo…/