Samuel Johnson was a deeply religious man and he came to depend on his Christian faith as the principal means by which to endure the pain of existence. He sought throughout his life to render himself worthy of salvation, but the difficulties which he experienced in trying to maintain a high degree of religious discipline - as well as his doubts about God's ultimate concern for man and his fears of his own spiritual unworthiness - led him into periods of madness and a perpetual dread of damnation. Charles Pierce examines the effect of Johnson's religous concerns upon the formation of his complex character, and on the great moral writing that began with The Vanity of Human Wishes and ended with Rasselas. He explores the paradox of a life which was dedicated to the Christian ideal and tormented by that same ideal. Previous works on Johnson's religious beliefs have been concerned with ascertaining what those beliefs were, and not with their effect. The main theme of this study is the importance of Johnson's beliefs in the formation of his character and their effect on the moral values expressed in his greatest writing and on the conduct of his life. It will be essential to anyone interested in the life and thought of one of the greatest English literary figures.

A unique one-volume selection of Samuel Johnson’s writings on spiritual and moral topics provides an unusually inspiring portrait of the man and his thought. Most readers know Dr. Johnson (1709—1784) as the formidable compiler of his famous Dictionary and as the witty conversationalist portrayed in Boswell’s Life. By contrast, this book–which draws on little-known unsigned sermons he wrote for hire for clergy friends, his private prayers and devotions, essays, poems, diaries, letters, and even key definitions from the Dictionary–offers a rare opportunity to discover Johnson’s rich insight and consoling spirituality gathered in one place. Boswell observed that "He was a sincere and zealous ChristianÉ. He was steady and inflexible in maintaining the obligations of religion and morality; both from a regard for the order of society, and from a veneration for the Great Source of all order." This Vintage Spiritual Classics Original opens a window on the moral universe of the leading English writer of the eighteenth century.

The first new biography for a generation of one of the great figures of English literature Poet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer, critic, conversationalist and wit, Dr Johnson is one of the great figures of English literature, perhaps the most quoted English writer after Shakespeare. Our view of Johnson has been overwhelmingly shaped by James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, the most famous biography in the English language. But invaluable as Boswell is as a source, he should not be the last word. This new biography illuminates the Johnson that Boswell never knew: 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. Very much the outsider, rather than the supremely confident dispenser of robust common sense. Using material unknown to previous biographers, Peter Martin describes the psychological knife-edge on which Johnson felt he lived, caused by his severe melancholia and his physical diseases. He explores Johnson's role in the publishing and printing world of the time and he reveals how important women were to Johnson throughout his life. The Samuel Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable and sympathetic figure than the one that Boswell so memorably portrayed.

A Summer/Fall 2018 Indies Introduce Debut Fiction Selection When Samuel Johnson dies, he finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to body as each one expires, Samuel’s soul journeys on a comic quest through an American half-century, inhabiting lives as stymied, in their ways, as his own. A ghost story of the most unexpected sort, Martin Riker’s extraordinary debut is about the ways experience is mediated, the unstoppable drive for human connection, and the struggle to be more fully alive in the world. Martin Riker grew up in central Pennsylvania. He worked as a musician for most of his twenties, in nonprofit literary publishing for most of his thirties, and has spent the first half of his forties teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2010, he and his wife Danielle Dutton co-founded the feminist press Dorothy, a Publishing Project. His fiction and criticism have appeared in publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, London Review of Books, the Baffler, and Conjunctions. This is his first novel.

Samuel Johnson is a writer of such significance that his era — the second half of the 18th century — is known as the Age of Johnson. Starting out as a Grub Street journalist, he made his mark on history as a poet, author, moralist, literary critic, political commentator, and lexiconographer. We, as moderns, need to know this man, and W. Jackson Bate's formidable biography, with its uncanny depth and empathy, is the book that makes that happen. Professor W. Jackson Bate is a lyrical writer who deftly explains the effect Johnson has had on scholars, critics, and readers of all kinds through the past 200 years: "The reason Johnson has always fascinated so many people of different kinds," Bate writes, "is not simply that [he] is so vividly picturesque and quotable . . . The deeper secret of his hypnotic attraction, especially during our own generation, lies in the immense reassurance he gives to human nature." Bate delves deep into the character that formed Johnson's intellect and fueled his prodigious contribution to literature, religion, politics, and our understanding of the nature of humankind, revealing the fascinating nature — both odd and adored — of this literary luminary.