As a genre, biography has produced some of the most famous books ever written.
In the Western world these include classical group biographies like Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Suetonius' Lives of the Twelve Caesars and Nepos' Lives of Eminent Commanders:
Plutarch, Parallel Lives (1470) Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars (1540)
As biography developed into a more nuanced genre during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, one encounters well-known group biographies such as Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times (better known as Lives of the Artists), Foxe's Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church (better known today as The Book of Martyrs) and Fuller's The History of the Worthies of England:
Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1568) Foxe, Book of Martyrs (1570)
The great age of individual biographies began in the late 18th century, and there is one biography from that period that stands head and shoulders above all others: James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson.
Boswell, the 9th Laird of Auchinleck, was a Scottish lawyer and diarist. He first met Samuel Johnson, author of Dictionary of the English Language, on 16 May 1763. Over the next several decades, Boswell penned numerous journals recalling his conversations with Johnson, upon which his biography of Johnson (who died in 1784) ultimately would be based.
Because Boswell did not meet Johnson until Johnson was already 53 years old, Boswell's biography of the man is not chronologically balanced, and since the biography only describes some 250 days when the men actually could have been together in each other's presence, much of the biography is based upon the recollections of others as well as of Johnson himself. For these and other reasons, many modern critics do not look kindly upon Boswell's efforts.
These caveats notwithstanding, Johnson's immense stature as lexicographer, essayist, lierary critic, poet, editor (and the second-most-quoted author in the English language after Shakespeare) has insured that Boswell's magnum opus has remained in print pretty much continuously since its original publication in 1791:
Tomorrow, we will look at some modern efforts to "include the excluded" in group biographies....
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