Bewigged, muscular and for his day unusually tall, adorned in soiled, rumpled clothes, beset by involuntary tics, opinionated, powered in his conversation by a prodigious memory and intellect, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was in his life a literary and social icon as no other age has produced. "Johnsonianissimus," as Boswell called him, became in the hands of his first biographers the rationalist epitome and sage of Enlightenment. These clichEs--though they contain elements of truth--distort the complexity of the public and private Johnson. Peter Martin portrays a Johnson wracked by...
Bewigged, muscular and for his day unusually tall, adorned in soiled, rumpled clothes, beset by involuntary tics, opinionated, powered in his conve...
A compelling history of the national conflicts that resulted from efforts to produce the first definitive American dictionary of English In The Dictionary Wars, Peter Martin recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English La
A compelling history of the national conflicts that resulted from efforts to produce the first definitive American dictionary of English In The Dictio...
A compelling history of the national conflicts that resulted from efforts to produce the first definitive American dictionary of English The Dictionary Wars recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. But what
A compelling history of the national conflicts that resulted from efforts to produce the first definitive American dictionary of English The Dictionar...
