James L. Clifford was a biographer of biography itself. His books on the young and middle-aged Samuel Johnson study biography's first serious theorist and the subject of the First work in the genre, James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791). Clifford's works on the practice of biography trace its history and vividly depict its labors. In his teaching, several generations of scholars discovered an enthusiasm for the truth that makes biography possible and valuable and is the foundation of scholarship.

James Lowry Clifford was born on 24 February 1901 in Evansville, Indiana. His mother, Emily Orr Clifford, read aloud to Clifford and his older brother, George, from the Bible, history books, and the works of Charles Dickens. His father, George Clifford, a successful businessman and an amateur astronomer, converted the family's carriage house into a laboratory where his science-minded sons tinkered and experimented. These investigations were the subject of Clifford's first published...