Dr Johnson and Mr Savage

(Paperback)

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A classic reissue of Richard Holmess brilliant book on Samuel Johnsons friendship with the poet Richard Savage, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.
Dr Johnson & Mr Savage is the story of a mysterious eighteenth-century friendship. Richard Savage was a poet, playwright and convicted murderer who roamed through the brothels and society salons of Augustan England creating a legend of poetic injustice. Strangest of all his achievements was the friendship he inspired in Samuel Johnson, then a young, unknown schoolmaster just arrived in London to seek his literary fortune. This puzzling intimacy helped to form Johnsons experience of the world and human passions, and led to his masterpiece The Life of Richard Savage, which revolutionized the art of biography and virtually invented the idea of the poet as a romantic, outcast figure.

Richard Holmes gradually reconstructs this alliance, throwing suprising new light on the character of Dr Johnson. This extraordinary book also questions the very nature of life-writing and exposes the conflicts between friendship, truth and advocacy which the modern form has inherited.

Reviews

As tense as a detective story and as rich as a Hogarth print, this is the work of a master-biographer. John Carey, Sunday Times

Richard Holmess Dr Johnson & Mr Savage is enthralling, well-written and convincing, a model of tactful psychological biography. One reads it with the pleasure one derives from great imaginative literature. Theodore Dalrymple, Spectator

Samuel Johnsons Life of Mr Richard Savage is now perfectly complemented by Holmess volume which acts as a Baedeker through the reeking purlieus of an 18th-century Grub Street, while at the same time bringing fully to life two of the most complex and fascinating characters of English letters. Peter Ackroyd

Holmes, one of the most subtle and imaginative of contemporary biographers, is a virtuoso sleuth, an inspired rooter out of the human being netted in the web of words spun by a poem or a memoir. He combines scholarship with a rare gift of empathy, a deep personal involvement with his subjectHis writing seems to glow from the fusion of an acute critical intelligence with a deep poetic and imaginative insight. Patrick Taylor Martin, Literary Review

A chiaroscuro masterpiece. David Nokes, TLS

Author Bio

Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. In 1974 he published "Shelley: The Pursuit" which won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as "surely the best biography of Shelley ever written". He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 1992 was awarded an OBE. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.