Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was an English writer, lexicographer and critic, the dominant literary figure of his age. The son of a Lichfield bookseller, he left Oxford without a degree for want of money and came to London in 1737 to live by his pen. His poems London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, the essays of The Rambler and The Idler, the tale Rasselas, the Dictionary of the English Language of 1755, compiled almost alone in nine years, the edition of Shakespeare and the Lives of the Poets followed. He is the most quoted talker in English, thanks to the biography by his friend James Boswell.