Word: bated
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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SAMUEL JOHNSON by W. Jackson Bate Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 646 pages...
...books have ever more deserved that worn encomium "long awaited" than Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Samuel Johnson. "Like so many others who have thought to write on Johnson," Bate observed in his earlier book on the subject (1955), "I have found that every year that passes leaves one feeling less qualified to do it." But undergraduates who thronged to his celebrated lectures on Johnson at Harvard would not have been disheartened by such a modest dis claimer. Even so, Bate's biography surpasses every expectation. It is an achievement that rivals Richard Ellmann's James...
...described him-Boswell nevertheless produced the most vivid and exhaustive biographical portrait in literature. Modern biographers have before them a daunting monument, the quotable Johnson of old age, living in picturesque squalor, holding forth on any topic. He was "the greatest talker in the history of the English language," Bate claims. And how simple it would have been just to elaborate on that legend: the proud writer dining behind a screen because he was ashamed of his tattered clothes; the compulsive walker in the streets of London who had to touch each lamppost he passed by; the bizarre figure whom...
...Bate has ignored none of these peculiarities, but what fascinates him is Johnson's temperament. By "storming the main gate of experience," Bate writes in a typically vigorous formulation, Johnson managed to resist his own failings and acquire mastery over "the dark, bewildered prison house of the isolated subjective self." His life was a series of afflictions: childhood illnesses that left him half deaf and half blind, recurrent episodes of near insanity, a career at Oxford that ended after a year because he could no longer afford the tuition, marriage to a woman 20 years his senior who died...
...Bate, who has taught at Harvard since 1946, has served as chairman of both the History and Literature Departments and the English Department...