Oct. 29: James Boswell, Scottish biographer

BORN OCTOBER 29:

James Boswell (1740-1795) Scottish biographer and perhaps the world's most famous literary hanger-on. Boswell was a friend of London's 18th-century literary lion, the great Samuel Johnson, and capitalized on that friendship by writing what has been considered "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature," namely, The Life of Samuel Johnson. Boswell wrote other works as well, but so famous was his biography that dictionaries call "any devoted biographer of a specific person" by the term "a Boswell."

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