num_pages: 272
description: In this outstanding eminently readable work of literary scholarship Holmes explores the enigmatic friendship between Samuel Johnson and the poet Richard Savage whom Johnson memorialized in Lives of the Poets . Synthesizing a wide array of contradictory historical sources from Johnsons Life of Savage to Boswells Life of Johnson  the correspondence of Johnsons contemporaries and modern scholarship Holmes shows that Savage was a notorious and alluring figure when Johnson first arrived in London in 1737. . . . Holmes enlivens his study with keen insights into the art of biography and evocative glimpses into the professional literary industry of 18th-century its oppositional politics literary journals and Grub Street coffee houses bustling with impoverished writers. Publishers Weekly In the course of explaining how and why Johnson told his story as he did Holmes provides a fairly full biography of Savage the first book-length study since Clarence Tracys The Artificial Bastard (1953). Holmes book . . . is at once learned and a pleasure to read. Library Journal
language: English
title: Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage
publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group