Poet essayist biographer lexicographer critic conversationalist & wit Dr Johnson is one of the great figures of English literature perhaps the most"ed English writer after Shakespeare. This new biography illuminates the unknown Johnson: the awkward youth the unsuccessful schoolmaster the eccentric marriage his early years in London in the 1740s scratching a living the epic struggle to produce the Dictionary. Using material unknown to previous biographers Peter Martin describes the psychological knife-edge on which Johnson felt he lived caused by his severe melancholia & his physical diseases. The Samuel Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious unpredictable & sympathetic figure than the one that Boswell so memorably portrayed.