James Boswell has been known as the author of one book, and that a very influential and, more recently, a very controversial one. After two hundred years Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791) is still widely read, and generates more debate as to its truth, its self-revelatory nature, and what it tells us about Johnson than it has at any time in the past. But whatever Boswell's strengths and shortcomings as a biographer, the portrait of Johnson that concludes the Life represents a summation of the biographer's efforts at grasping, understanding and passing on to posterity the essence of the man he revered so highly, and in relation to whom he expended much effort and ingenuity in defining himself. It is therefore fitting that this collection of essays, taking the occasion of the bicentenary of the Life to explore the relationship between Boswell's complex talents and his commitment to “writing the self,” should be prefaced by the portrait of Johnson that concludes the Life. The following passage comes from Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, revised and enlarged by L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–64), IV, 425–30.