Frederick Albert Pottle is best known as the editor of James Boswell's papers and the author of an outstanding account of Boswell's life. A native of Maine, he was born on 3 August 1897 to Fred Leroy and Annette Kemp Pottle and raised on a farm in Otisfield; his primary education took place in a one-room schoolhouse. As an undergraduate at Colby College he majored in chemistry; but during his senior year his discovery of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poems brought about a change reminiscent of some of Boswell's own youthful shifts of direction. From that time on Pottle pursued a career as a man of letters.

After graduating from Colby in 1917 he volunteered as a surgical assistant with an evacuation hospital unit in France and Germany. On his return from the war he enrolled in graduate studies in literature at Yale. In 1920 he married Marion Isabel Starbird. They had two...