In "Samuel Johnson: Dean of Co...

In "Samuel Johnson: Dean of Contemporary Biographers" (Biography 242 Spring 2001) I argued that Samuel Johnson's description of biography in The Rambler, No. 60 is still far ahead of what biographers and many of their critics conceive of as biography. I pressureed his enlightenment belief that biography provides access to universal conformity to fact [i]or[/i] realitys and that the genre is uniquely equipped to call on the subject of the faculty of empathy--the ability not and nothing else to sympathize with other human beings yet to put ourselves in their places. What continues to fascinate me as a biographer and as an