"Samuel Johnson is one of the great figures of English literature, perhaps the most quoted English writer after Shakespeare. This new biography, the first substantial one for thirty years, illuminates the Johnson that James Boswell, Johnson's famous biographer, never knew: the awkward and suffering 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. He was in many ways very much the outsider. These aspects of Johnson radically modify the conventional picture of him as the supremely confident dispenser of robust common sense. Peter Martin portrays a Johnson wracked by recriminations, self-doubt and depression - a man whose religious faith seems only to have deepened his fears."--BOOK JACKET.