Glover Publishes Article on The Boswell Club

Dr. Brian Glover has just published an article titled “The Boswell Club of Chicago, 1942-1973” in The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, volume 25.

The Boswell Club of Chicago, which flourished between 1942 and 1973, was a decidedly non-scholarly men’s club dedicated to both social and literary pursuits. Its eccentric founder, Rousseau Van Voorhies, imagined an imitation in Chicago of both the real eighteenth-century social life depicted in James Boswell’s writings and the imaginary Academy that Boswell and Johnson dream up for St. Andrews in Boswell’s Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides. This article argues that the club’s social vision put the eighteenth century in service of mid-twentieth-century anxieties about bureaucratized capitalism, communications technologies, and corporate masculinity.