Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784, English critic, poet, and author of the first major English dictionary. He also wrote Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, better known as The Lives of The Poets, a series of biographies of English poets including Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Gay. Johnson is best known through James Boswell's biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), though another firsthand biographical account is to be found in the Anecdotes of his friend and confidante Hester Thrale Piozzi.