Samuel Johnson
✓ Source-basedfallingEnglish writer and lexicographer (1709-1784)
He wrote the first comprehensive dictionary of English - 42,733 entries across nine years - and it held the throne for 150 years until the OED arrived. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history".
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About this person
Born in Lichfield in 1709, Johnson left Pembroke College, Oxford when his money ran out, worked as a teacher, then moved to London to write for The Gentleman's Magazine. Early poems and biographies led to the nine-year grind that produced A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, acclaimed as "one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship". He followed with Rasselas (1759), an edition of Shakespeare's plays (1765), and after befriending James Boswell in 1763 and traveling to Scotland, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). His last major work, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-1781), offered biographies and criticism of 52 poets and reshaped how literary criticism was practiced. Tall, deaf in one ear, blind in one eye, he made uncontrolled gestures throughout his life - tics that biographers documented in such detail they later suggested Tourette syndrome. He died in December 1784, aged 75, and Boswell's 1791 biography of him became "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
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