In this outstanding, eminently readable work of literary scholarship, Holmes explores the enigmatic friendship between Samuel Johnson and the poet Richard Savage, whom Johnson memorialized in Lives of the Poets. Synthesizing a wide array of contradictory historical sources, from Johnson’s Life of Savage to Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the correspondence of Johnson’s contemporaries and modern scholarship, Holmes shows that Savage was a notorious and alluring figure when Johnson first arrived in London in 1737… .

Holmes enlivens his study with keen insights into the art of biography and evocative glimpses into the professional literary industry of 18th-century London: its oppositional politics, literary journals and Grub Street coffee houses bustling with impoverished writers. -Publishers Weekly

In the course of explaining how and why Johnson told his story as he did, Holmes provides a fairly full biography of Savage, the first book-length study since Clarence Tracy’s The Artificial Bastard (1953). Holmes’ book … is at once learned and a pleasure to read. -Library Journal