Volume 6, Number 10 · June 9, 1966
A Singular Being
By John Wain
James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740-1769
by Frederick A. Pottle
McGraw-Hill, 606 pp., $12.50
Of course Boswell is worth a biography. We know so much about him that the sheer welter of material demands to be pressed and shaped into a whole; it is like having a ton of clay lying idle in one's back yard. Add the sheer number of famous men whom he knew, and you have a respectable reason for studying him; add his furious sexuality, and he automatically becomes a pet of the mid-twentieth century. And then his open, eager, defenseless temperament, always ready to blab out the truth however discreditable, makes him at once a favorite with the public that enjoys reading Herzog or Henry Miller's Tropics.
Review, 1876 words
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