Samuel Johnson: The Struggle - Hardcover

Jeffrey Meyers holds a Ph.D. in English literature. He has written over twenty books, and is a frequent contributor to the New Criterion, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Times Higher Education Supplement. He lives in Kensington, California.

*Starred Review* The second major new biography anticipating the natal tercentenary of the predominant figure in eighteenth-century English literature is by a much more prolific biographer than Peter Martin, whose fine Samuel Johnson (2008) took Johnson’s melancholy as its organizing theme. Meyers, whose previous subjects include movie stars, painters, and twentieth-century writers, structures his life around Johnson’s struggles not just with his morbid cast of mind but to accomplish virtually everything he achieved. That difference in emphasis has little effect on the core story both biographers tell, which is one of a rise from poverty to preeminence achieved despite great physical (Johnson had Tourette’s syndrome, a blind eye, and partial deafness) as well as psychological handicaps. Meyers, however, celebrates Johnson the author more than Martin does. He argues the quality of Johnson’s poems, essays, biocritical sketches, the philosophical romance Rasselas, and even the sermons he wrote for his clerical friend John Taylor by examining Johnson’s craft. If he provides less than Martin on some of the figures around Johnson, such as the helpers with his great dictionary, he provides much more on the higher-profile likes of Edmund Burke and Fanny Burney. More than Martin, he makes us want to read his subject. Surely that is the greatest service a writer’s biographer could ever perform. --Ray Olson