Published for the first time in 1950, this “lost” classic sets forth the events of nine momentous months in the life of the 22-year-old James Boswell, later to become the biographer of Samuel Johnson. It is an account of Boswell’s personal struggle for independence from his family, and for self-preservation. But the Journal projects intimate confession and shrewd self-analysis against the vivid panorama of eighteenth-century London: the high life and the low, Parliament, a public execution, conversations with Garrick and Sheridan.