Years of success and fame

Johnson's Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, a moral fable (a mythical story that usually teaches a lesson about life) concerned with an innocent young man's search for the secret of happiness, appeared in 1759. The work was immediately successful; six editions and a number of translations appeared during Johnson's lifetime. In 1762 Johnson accepted a yearly pension of £300 from King George III (1738–1820). A year later he met James Boswell (1740–1795), the son of a Scottish judge. Boswell became Johnson's devoted companion and eventually wrote the great biography of his hero.

In 1765 Johnson met Henry Thrale, a well-to-do brewer, and in the Thrales' home Johnson found an escape from the solitude he had experienced since his wife's death in 1752. In 1765 Johnson published an eight-volume edition of the works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). In 1773 James Boswell persuaded Johnson to join him in a tour of Scotland, and both men recorded their trip—Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell's journal.

Johnson's last great work, the ten-volume Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (better known as the Lives of the Poets ), was completed when he was seventy-two. It is a series of biographical and critical studies of fifty-two English poets. Johnson was saddened in his last years by the death of his old friend Dr. Robert Levett, by the death of Thrale, and by a quarrel with Thrale's widow, who had remarried with, what seemed to Johnson, inappropriate haste. Johnson died on December 13, 1784, in his house in London, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.