Peter Martin (professor)

Peter Martin
Born	1940 (age 83–84) Buenos Aires, Argentina
Nationality	Argentina, United States, England, Spain
Education	Principia College (1962), Syracuse University (2020)
Occupation(s)	Historian, biographer, English literature scholar
Known for	English literature scholar

Peter Martin (born 1940) is an English literature scholar, biographer, and an 18th century garden historian. He was educated and has taught in the United States. He lives in England and Spain.

Biography

Martin has been a professor at Miami University; the College of William & Mary; New England College in Arundale, West Sussex, England; and in the English department of Principia College (1993–2002). For several years, he was a garden historian for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

He has written several books on historical and biographical topics, including Samuel Johnson: A Biography, A Life of James Boswell, and about Edmond Malone. His has written about gardens and gardening in Williamsburg and Colonial Virginia, including British and American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century, The Gardening World of Alexander Pope and Pursuing Innocent Pleasures. He also created 'the dictionary wars' in American lexicography and A Dog Called Perth about the 21-year relationship with his dog.

Martin was born and lived in Argentina until the age of ten. He is a 1962 graduate of the Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. He has lived in a village in Sussex, England and El Campello, Spain.

Published works

• Martin, Peter, ed. (1984). British and American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century: Eighteen Illustrated Essays. University of Virginia Press. ISBN 978-0-87935-105-2.
• Martin, Peter (1984). Pursuing Innocent Pleasures: The Gardening World of Alexander Pope. Archon Books. ISBN 978-0-208-02011-6.
• Martin, Peter (1991). The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia: From Jamestown to Jefferson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-8139-2053-5.
• Martin, Peter (1995). Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar: A Literary Biography. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-61982-0.
• Martin, Peter (1999). A Life of James Boswell. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-81809-0.
• Martin, Peter (2001). A Dog Called Perth: The True Story of a Beagle. Orion Books. ISBN 978-1-55970-652-0.
• Martin, Peter, ed. (2003). The Essential Boswell: Selections from the Writings of James Boswell. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-60718-2.
• Martin, Peter (2008). Samuel Johnson: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-60719-9.
• Martin, Peter (2009). Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-03585-0.
• Martin, Peter (2019). The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-18891-1.

Further reading

• Craig, Robert M. (1992). "Review of The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia: From Jamestown to Jefferson". Eighteenth-Century Studies. 26 (1): 176–9. doi:10.2307/2739262. ISSN 0013-2586. JSTOR 2739262.
• Wilson, David Scofield (1993). "Review of The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia: From Jamestown to Jefferson". The William and Mary Quarterly. 50 (1): 209–211. doi:10.2307/2947253. ISSN 0043-5597. JSTOR 2947253.
• Linden-Ward, Blanche (1992). "Review of The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia: From Jamestown to Jefferson". Journal of the Early Republic. 12 (1): 102–104. doi:10.2307/3123984. ISSN 0275-1275. JSTOR 3123984.
• Quitt, Martin H. (1993). "Review of The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia: From Jamestown to Jefferson". The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 101 (1): 160–2. ISSN 0042-6636. JSTOR 4249335.
• O'Malley, Therese (1992). "Appropriation and Adaptation: Early Gardening Literature in America". Huntington Library Quarterly. 55 (3): 401–31. doi:10.2307/3817685. ISSN 0018-7895. JSTOR 3817685.
• Scanlan, J. T. (1998). "Review of Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar: A Literary Biography". The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 97 (3): 444–7. ISSN 0363-6941. JSTOR 27711715.
• Taylor, Christopher (9 August 2008). "Blame it on Boswell". The Guardian. Retrieved 4 August 2010.
• Hensher, Philip (2 August 2008). "Not tired of this life". The Spectator. Retrieved 4 August 2010.
• Fergusson, James (17 August 2008). "Samuel Johnson: A Biography by Peter Martin". The Sunday Times. Archived from the original on June 15, 2011. Retrieved 4 August 2010.
• Price, Leah (30 January 2009). "Lives of Johnson". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 August 2010.
• Robshaw, Brandon (20 December 2009). "Samuel Johnson: A Biography, By Peter Martin". The Independent. Retrieved 5 August 2010.
• Kirsch, Adam (23 February 2009). "Money Made Him Do It: What Samuel Johnson can teach us about writing". Slate. Retrieved 5 August 2010.
• Johnston, George Sim (18 September 2008). "A Melancholy Man of Letters". The Wall Street Journal. p. A23. Retrieved 5 August 2010.
• Cook, Daniel (2010). "Dr Johnson's Heart". The Cambridge Quarterly. 39 (2): 186–95. doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfq006.
• Rawson, Claude (7 January 2001). "Boswell's Boswell". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 August 2010. Martin's is not the first biography to make use of the Yale archive. Boswell's earlier and later careers were written up by Frederick A. Pottle and Frank Brady, in two densely documented, though readable, works of record. This new life of James Boswell makes available to nonscholarly readers a vivid and sensitively observed narrative that takes account of the full range of new information.
• Shinagel, Michael (2001). "Review of A Life of James Boswell". Harvard Review. 20: 161–3. JSTOR 27568530.
• Korshin, Paul J. (2003). "Review of A Life of James Boswell". The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 102 (3): 438–42. JSTOR 27712365.
• Baruth, Philip (2002). "Something Old, Something New: Two Recent (and Contradictory) Portraits of James Boswell". Eighteenth-Century Studies. 35 (2): 279–84. doi:10.1353/ecs.2002.0002. ISSN 1086-315X. S2CID 162310261.
• Hitchings, Henry (6 September 1999). "A-whoring we go". New Statesman. Archived from the original on 2011-01-11. Retrieved 5 August 2010. In conveying a picture of this constant wavering, Martin's treatment of his material is dextrous and assured, and he offers a refreshingly ambiguous portrait of his subject.
• Holmes, Richard (20 September 2001). "Triumph of an Artist". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 5 August 2010.