It’s the birthday of James Boswell (1740-1795), who wrote what is considered to be the greatest biography in the English language, Life of Samuel Johnson (2 volumes, 1791), which broke with boring old staid tradition by incorporating actual conversations Boswell had with Johnson and bringing the man to life with vivid personal details.

Boswell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland; his father was a judge, his mother a Calvinist, and his family ambitious, and because Boswell hated his school, he was tutored at home instead for years. He studied arts at the University of Edinburgh from the age of 13, then went to the University of Glasgow for law at 19. Crazy hijinks ensued: Boswell decided to convert to Catholicism and become a monk, his father said “No sirree Bob” and ordered him home, Boswell instead ran away to London and learned that Loose Living was far more fun than the life of a monk, which revelation led to his contracting gonorrhea (thereafter his close friend for life), Boswell’s father said “YOUNG MAN YOU GET BACK HERE” and dragged him home, and Boswell was forced to study law in Edinburgh which—I am just guessing here—was less fun than either Loose Living or being a monk. Boswell passed the civil law exam in 1762, was allowed to return to London, and began to keep a lively and honest journal that would later earn him recognition as one of the world’s greatest diarists.

In 1763, Boswell met Samuel Johnson and the two became great friends almost instantly.

Boswell travelled, had affairs, eventually married his cousin Margaret, and had seven children and more affairs. In 1785 he published The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D (1785) as a sort of first installment of Johnson’s bio. (Johnson had died in 1784.) It wasn’t until the 1920s that a trove of Boswell’s private papers was discovered in a castle near Dublin and another trove in Aberdeenshire; they began to be published in 1950, starting with Boswell’s London Journal.

Boswell himself died in London at the age of about 55 after his years of hard drinking and venereal disease caught up with him.

Have a beautiful fall Tuesday filled with intellectual challenge and clean, prudent living and stay scrupulously honest to the data.