title: Samuel Johnson: The Struggle
author:  Jeffrey Meyers 
description: Dr. Johnson was one of the most keenly observed figures in his time, and with the second book of the season anticipating the 2009 tercentenary of his birth (after Peter Martin's, published by Harvard in September), he remains a massive, grotesque genius who continues to haunt us. Popularly written by prolific biographer and literary critic Meyers (<i>Hemingway</i>), this departs from a strict chronology to narrate significant events and their meaning for Johnson. A central concern involves one of Johnson's darkest secrets, which Meyers says other biographers have evaded: his masochistic sexuality at the hands of his confidante Mrs. Hester Thrale. The biography also speculates on other aspects of Johnson's sex life, both during his marriage to a much older woman and after her death. But Meyers's book is balanced and accomplishes much else. In discussing the great <i>Dictionary</i> that made Johnson famous (and led to a royal pension to ease his hardscrabble life), the <i>Rambler</i> and <i>Idlers</i> essays, Johnson's edition of Shakespeare and <i>Lives of the Poets</i>, Meyers goes to the heart of a tortured, contradictory and pessimistic sage whose self-lacerating personality, says Meyers, would come to influence modernists as disparate as Woolf, Beckett and Nabokov. 19 illus. <i>(Dec.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  Anecdotes of Johnson
  
  
  INTRODUCTION
  
  [AUTHOR'S PREFACE.](Anecdotes%20of%20Johnson_split_001.html#filepos8330)
  
  [ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON,
  LL.D.](Anecdotes%20of%20Johnson_split_001.html#filepos11536)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  # Anecdotes of Johnson
  
  
  ### Hesther Lynch Piozzi
  
  
  This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  * INTRODUCTION
  
  
  * [AUTHOR'S PREFACE.](Anecdotes%20of%20Johnson_split_001.html#filepos8330)
  
  
  * [ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.](Anecdotes%20of%20Johnson_split_001.html#filepos11536)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
      
  
  Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson
  
  
  ### INTRODUCTION
  
  
  Mrs. Piozzi, by her second marriage, was by her first marriage the
  
  
  Mrs. Thrale in whose house at Streatham Doctor Johnson was, after the
  
  
  year of his first introduction, 1765, in days of infirmity, an
  
  
  honoured and a cherished friend. The year of the beginning of the
  
  
  friendship was the year in which Johnson,