Samuel Johnson -- Mr. Los Angeles

Johnson's dictionary was his era's Wikipedia, its Google, and Johnson himself was the 18th century equivalent of a blogger. "Posterity will be astonished when they are told, upon the authority of Johnson himself," Boswell wrote, "that many of these discourses, which we should suppose had been laboured with all the slow attention of literary leisure, were written in haste as the moment pressed, without even being read over by him before they were printed." Johnson's dictionary, on view in all its splendid hugeness at the Huntington, has nearly 43,000 entries and many more quotes from English literature supporting each word. It was put together almost entirely by his recalling the works in which certain words had been used.

Johnson thought he would finish his lexicon in three years, and on being told that it took the French Academy 40 years and the work of 40 scholars to write the French dictionary, he replied: "Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; 40 times 40 is 1,600. So as three is to 1,600, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman." (Math was not his forte.) The dictionary actually took him nine painful years. Once it was published, his fame was ensured.

As we think about Johnson and the modern world, it is important to reject the idea that his world, which prized the written and spoken word and valued an important thought well expressed, is lost. "Blind Sam," the Johnson portrait by Reynolds that presides over the exhibit at the Huntington, shows Johnson holding an open book, its pages folded back, in his two hands, very close up to his face, his cloudy wig like weather atop a stormy mind, a knot of intense concentration between his brows. Another Reynolds portrait shows him leaning back in a chair, his imposing stomach released by an unbuttoned jacket, a plumed pen in his hand and a manuscript on the table before him. Only a small trick of the imagination, a smudge here, a narrowing there, and he is James Wolcott, he is Huffington, he is Jon Stewart.

He's not holding a Kindle, it's true, and he's not sitting at a keyboard. And certainly he would look askance at today's utter democratization of the published word. But in his dictionary, he defines a writer as "1. One who practices the art of writing; 2. an author." These are not elitist definitions. They can easily include Johnson, Goldsmith and Boswell, as well as anyone from Stephanie Meyer to William Vollmann to the toilers at Gawker and Huffpo and "The Daily Show." Community and honesty were among the things Dr. Johnson most prized in his acquaintances, and that is still what it takes, today, to create a world of ideas and keep it spinning.