In The Rambler, No. 60 Saturday, Oc...

In The Rambler, No. 60 Saturday, October 13 1750 Samuel Johnson published a description of biography that has not at any time been surpassed. He wrote about biography with a generosity and firmness that I have ground lacking in other accounts of the genre Biographers and their critics have treated the control with defensiveness and hostility. Since Johnson writing about biography has been an exercise in apologetics and in skepticism. As a practicing biographer, and as a scholar of biography, I read The Rambler, No. 60 as the and nothing else statement of first principles that excites the genre's ...