Eagerly awaited for more than a decade, James Boswell, The Earlier Years is a rapid and compelling narrative. The long line of lairds of Auchinleck are shown pressing on Boswell's consciousness. His childhood and adolescence for the first time take shape. His religious turmoils, which carried him through Methodism and Pythagoreanism to Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, are absorbingly reconstructed. His flirtations, his guilt-ridden affair with a young married woman of his own circle, his intrigues with actresses, his dealings with his lively kept-mistress, his occasional recourse to street-girls, are frankly presented as essential but subordinate details. We are never allowed to lose sight of Boswell the intrepid traveller, the admired author, the hard-working and brilliant criminal lawyer, the odd and lovable young man who charmed the Margrave of Baden-Durlach, the brilliant bluestocking Belle de Zuylen, the high-born lady Girolama Piccolomini, and such formidable heroes of letters as Johnson, Rousseau, and Voltaire.

From this brilliantly imaginative study emerges a man we can know almost perfectly: a paradoxical character, shrewd of head and foolish in behavior, vain and disarmingly honest, sensual and pious, charming and exasperating, self-indulgent and warm-hearted, who somehow in the Age of Enlightenment managed to think and write like a man of the twentieth century.