Richard Savage (1697–1743) is known mostly for the time he spent in the company of Samuel Johnson, when they were fellow strugglers in literary London during the late 1730s. Johnson was then on the brink of assembling a body of work that would bring him immense renown, while Savage was moving towards the end of his life as a hack writer, in a career that had yielded more humiliations than triumphs. Their relationship forms the background to Johnson’s celebrated

of his friend (1744). In recent years it has given rise to a prize-winning biographic account by Richard Holmes,

(1993), and it figured centrally in Adam Rounce’s study of the heroic failures of eighteenth-century literature (2013), in which Savage exemplifies “The unfulfilled literary life”.

1614 words

Citation: Rogers, Pat. "An Author to be Lett". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 May 2021 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=40505, accessed 21 November 2024.]

• View recommended reading for this article