Writer's Life: More Ups Than Downs

Lessing, Doris

Kershaw, Alex

<p>Lives that Never Grow Old</p> <p>Part of a radical new series -edited by Richard Holmes - that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Johnson's book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.</p> <p>When he first came to London, young Samuel Johnson was befriended by the flamboyant poet, playwright and blackmailer, Richard Savage. Walking the backstreets at night, he learned Savage's extraordinary story - supposedly persecuted by a 'cruel mother', sentenced to death for a murder in a brothel, appointed Volunteer Poet Laureate to the Queen, and finally broken and outcast.</p> <p>With this moving and intimate account, Johnson created a brilliant black comedy of 18th-century Grub Street which revolutionised English biography by its psychological realism. Yet Savage's destructive charm and delusions of grandeur sometimes even threatened to entangle Johnson himself.</p>

Wilson, A N

Dudgeon, Piers

Holmes, Richard