Annual Dinner

The focal activity for all dues-paying members of The Samuel Johnson Society of the West (SJSW) is the dinner held in November at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. In addition to the Daniel G. Blum lecture, delivered by an internationally recognized scholar or collector of Johnsoniana, the event includes an eighteenth-century inspired meal as well as period music.

Greg Clingham, Professor Emeritus Bucknell University, will present the twenty-ninth Daniel G. Blum Lecture at the society’s annual meeting 24 November 2024.  Prof. Clingham has published extensively on Johnson, Boswell, and the age; he is the author of Johnson, Writing and Memory, and he has edited such works as The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson and Samuel Johnson After 300 Years (with Philip Smallwood).  At Bucknell University, Prof. Clingham held the John P. Crozer Chair of English Literature and served as the director of Bucknell University Press.  He is currently Visiting Research Professor, Pennsylvania State Humanities Institute, and the editor of the series 18th-Century Moments (Clemson University Press).  Prof. Clingham’s eighteenth-century scholarship is celebrated in A Clubbable Man:  Essays in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham.

Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1775)