Boswell's Life of Johnson: Abridged and edited, with an introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood

How it begins

Phillips Brooks once told the boys at Exeter that in reading biography three men meet one another in close intimacy—the subject of the biography, the author, and the reader. Of the three the most interesting is, of course, the man about whom the book is written. The most privileged is the reader, who is thus allowed to live familiarly with an eminent man. Least regarded of the three is the author. It is his part to introduce the others, and to develop between them an acquaintance, perhaps a friendship, while he, though ever busy and solicitous, withdraws into the background. Some think that Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, did not sufficiently realize his duty of self-effacement.