Boswell's Lfe of Samuel Johnson Author:edited by Edmund Fuller Examples of the acerbic wit which made Samuel Johnson the ideal subject for the most famous biography ever written. Stylist, lexicographer, poet, raconteur, Johnson was the first among eighteenth-century English gentlemen. And thus his biographer, Boswell: "On my observing to him that a certain gentleman had remained silent the whole evening, in... more » the midst of a very brillant and learned society, 'Sir, (said he) the conversation overflowed, and drowned him.'"« less