Samuel Johnson: Selected Works

An anthology of the essential and enduring works of Samuel Johnson
 
Samuel Johnson was eighteenth-century Britain’s preeminent man of letters—moral and literary critic, biographer, lexicographer, and poet—and his influence endures to this day. This anthology, designed to make Johnson’s essential works accessible to students and general readers, draws its texts from the definitive Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. It includes many essays from The Rambler and other periodicals; Rasselas; the prefaces to Johnson’s Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; the complete Lives of Cowley, Milton, Pope, Savage, and Gray, as well as generous selections from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.

The anthology is organized so that readers can focus on such topics as religion, marriage, war, and literature, and most texts are included in their entirety. The authors provide a biographical introduction and ample annotation to update and enlarge the commentary in the Yale Edition.

Robert DeMaria, Jr., is the Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English at Vassar College. Stephen Fix is the Robert G. Scott ’68 Professor of English at Williams College. Howard D. Weinbrot is the Ricardo Quintana Professor emeritus of English and William Freeman Vilas Research Professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.