Volume 32, Number 5 · March 28, 1985
The Seductive Journalist
By Irvin Ehrenpreis
James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769–1795
by Frank Brady
McGraw-Hill, 609 pp., $24.95
When James Boswell was twenty, he ran away from the University of Glasgow and went to London. There he meant to become a Roman Catholic, perhaps a monk. But an attentive friend of a friend diverted him with the pleasures of the town; and instead of entering a monastery, Boswell caught his first case of gonorrhea. Seldom has a career of sexual misconduct been more scrupulously documented than the thirty-five years of Boswellian excess which followed. Frank Brady, in his accurate biography, continues Frederick Pottle's James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740–1769 (1966); and in his compact closing sentences finds that the illness which at last killed his protagonist was uremia, brought on by chronic postgonorrheal infection.
Review, 3725 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |