Written by Frederick A. Pottle, founding General Editor of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, this is the first volume of the standard two-volume scholarly biography of Boswell. Covering the first twenty-nine years of his life, from his birth in Edinburgh in October 1740 to his marriage to his cousin Margaret Montgomerie in November 1769, it was followed in 1984 by Frank Brady's companion volume, James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769-1795.

Drawing on the full archive of unpublished journals, letters, and legal and family records at Yale, Pottle traces Boswell's upbringing under his father Lord Auchinleck, his university education in Edinburgh and Glasgow, his early literary pamphlets, the London Journal of 1762-1763 and first meeting with Samuel Johnson, his law studies in Utrecht, his Grand Tour interviews with Rousseau, Voltaire, and General Pasquale Paoli, his admission to the Scottish bar in 1766, and the triumph of An Account of Corsica (1768). The volume includes more than a hundred pages of detailed endnotes and bibliographical documentation. Readers seeking a condensed, single-volume biography without extensive apparatus may also consult Peter Martin's A Life of James Boswell (1999).