Samuel Johnson

Nineteenth-century biographers fostered the image of Johnson as an awkward, unkempt eccentric, whose conversation was certainly lively and memorable, but whose literary influence was slight. A full-scale scholarly evaluation of Johnson's contributions as a writer began only in the mid-20th century. The psychological study Samuel Johnson (1944), by American critic Joseph Wood Krutch opened up new ways of thinking about the man and his work. The most comprehensive and penetrating scholarship has been that of Walter Jackson Bate, another American literary scholar, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Samuel Johnson (1977). In these studies Johnson emerges as a troubled but undaunted man, compassionate to the poor and oppressed, relentless in his quest for truth, a humanist par excellence. His writing, in defense of reason against the wiles of unchecked fancy and emotion, championed the values of artistic and moral order.