This book is the first to assess Johnson’s diverse insights into friendship—that is to say, his profound as well as widely ranging appreciation of it—over the course of his long literary career. It examines his engagements with ancient philosophies of friendship and with subsequent reformulations of or departures from that diverse inheritance. The volume explores and illuminates Johnson’s understanding of friendship in the private and public spheres—in particular, friendship’s therapeutic amelioration of personal experience and transformative impact upon civil life. Doing so, it considers both his portrayals of interaction with his friends and his more overtly fictional representations of friendship across the many genres in which he wrote. It presents at once an original re-assessment of Johnson’s writings and new interpretations of friendship as an element of civility in mid-eighteenth-century British culture.

Certain relationships are of profound importance for the moral life. Gilbert C. Meilaender explores some of the tensions which Christian experience discovers in one such relationship, the bond of friendship. These tensions help to explain why friendship was a more important topic in the life and thought of the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome than it has unusually been within Christendom. The bond of friendship (philia) involves special preference; Christian love (agape) is thought to be like the love of the heavenly Father who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. Philia requires that love be returned; agape is to be shown even the enemy, who does not love in return. Friendships sometimes fade away; Christians are enjoined to be faithful in love. These tensions have permeated our lives and helped to shape our world. We think politics a more important sphere than the private friendship bond. We seek fulfillment in and identify ourselves with our vocations -- by which we now mean, work for pay -- not our friendships. And in a world where politics and vocation are all-important, lasting friendships become more difficult to sustain. Friendship examines the tension between philia and agape and probes its significance for Christian thought and experience.

Famous literary friendships such as those between H.L. Mencken and James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert and Ivan Turgenev, and Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore are examined in this magnificent collection of stories, legends, poems, essays, letters, and memoirs that illuminate the breadth and depth of friendship in all its human complexity.

Jeffrey Meyers tells the extraordinary story of Samuel Johnson one of the most illustrious figures of English literary tradition. Johnson was famous as a poet, novelist, biographer, essayist, critic, editor, lexicographer, conversationalist and larger than life personality. After nine years of work Johnson's, 'A dictionary of the English Language, was published in 1755. He overcame great adversity to achieve success. 'The Struggle' is a masterful portrait of a brilliant and tormented figure.

Prize-winning biographer Leo Damrosch tells the story of “the Club,” a group of extraordinary writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavern In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.” In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth-century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.

In this groundbreaking portrait of Samuel Johnson, Nokes positions the great thinker in his rightful place as an active force in the Enlightenment, not a mere recorder or performer, and demonstrates how his interaction with life impacted his work.