During part of the time when I was writing My Sam Johnson, I maintained a blog and a podcast, partly about the process, but mostly with anecdotes from Sam’s life. I put both on hiatus in 2021 for a very practical purpose: so that I could have more time to finish the book. Well, now […]
Friendship was one of the most important things that Sam valued in life. He complained about many things, and many things gave him pain, but he constantly reiterated the value of having friends And, as this quote illustrates, he knew that those friendships had to be tended to as well. You couldn’t just assume that […]
Sam not only prayed frequently but also wrote his own prayers, sometimes tailored for a specific occasion, and sometimes simply composing something original instead of mouthing a well-known prayer, a passage from the Bible, or something like that. When he was nearly 60 (in the year 1768) he in fact transcribed many of his prayers, […]
I own about 15 modern biographies of Sam Johnson as well as another 15 written by his contemporaries. Some are long; some are short. Some are scholarly; some are not. Some are comprehensive; some cover an aspect or a period of Sam’s life. I thought it would be interesting to pick a single incident from […]
Thousands of letters that Sam sent during his lifetime, from his early 20s to his mid-70s, have survived to this day (and mostly, fortunately, are in the care of large academic libraries), and so his signature is a pretty familiar sight to anyone who studies, reads about, or just keeps up with all-things-Sam. Here it […]
Sam is 63 years old when he meets up with Boswell in Edinburgh and they both set out on what will be a three-month trip around Scotland. Specifically, the main focus of their road trip is what are generally called the Hebrides, an archipelago of about 500 islands in the Atlantic Ocean on the western […]
Sam was born in 1709 and so if we were to overlay our current generational alphabet diagram onto the 18th century, he would be a Gen Z. Different researchers and groups disagree on the exact demarcations between, for example, Gen Z and millennials, but everyone agrees that Generation Z folks were born about the mid-1990’s. […]
Not really, of course. There were no smartphones in the 18th century, and though I can’t imagine Sam taking lots of selfies even if there had been, I can certainly imagine Boswell taking all kinds of pics when he was in Sam’s company. And, frankly, given Boswell’s ceaseless examination of himself as well, I can […]
You may have heard that a philosophy prof at Portland State University in Oregon resigned September 8, and gave his reasons in an articulate and scathing open letter to the university’s provost. The letter addresses some pretty serious issues — and some pretty lacklustre responses by the university. The main issue is freedom of thought […]