A Life of James Boswell. By Peter Martin. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000. Pp. x + 613; 28 illus. $35.00.

James Boswell (1740-95) is unique in English literature, the only writer in the language whose name has become a common noun. (World literature affords another such name, that of Casanova.) There has long been a double tradition in Boswellian studies. The first side of it is the view of Boswell the great genius, author of the greatest biography in literary history, published in scores of different editions and hundreds of printings. Boswell lived long enough to publish only one revision of his 1791 classic (2nd ed., 1795); his nineteenth-century editors, from Edmond Malone (3rd through 6th editions) to George Birkbeck Hill (the Clarendon Press edition of 1887, including Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides), nourished this tradition. In the twentieth century, the discovery of Boswell's journals, correspondence, and manuscripts and their systematic editing and publication starting in 1951 by the late Frederick A.

Paul J. Korshin
University of Pennsylvania