Life of Johnson, Volume 6: Addenda, Index, Dicta Philosophi, Etc.

This final volume of Boswell's monumental biography opens a door into Johnson's private self. Here is the unrehearsed Johnson: documenting his 1773 tour of the Scottish Hebrides in journal entries that capture both the rugged landscape and the warmth of his friendship with Boswell, and recording his journey through North Wales with an explorer's eye for detail and a moralist's instinct for character. The volume gathers Johnson's letters to his printer, collaborators, and friends, revealing the working life of the man who produced the Dictionary and the Lives of the Poets. These are not the polished reflections of the biography but the raw material of a literary life: proposals and negotiations, financial anxieties, the daily business of being Samuel Johnson. For readers who have marveled at Boswell's portrait, these supplementary documents deepen and complicate it, showing us the man behind the monument.