William Hazlitt was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher who lived during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Today, he is celebrated as one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, earning comparisons to monumental literary figures such as Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. In addition to his literary achievements, Hazlitt is widely acknowledged by modern historians as the finest art critic of his age.
Despite his formidable reputation and high standing among historians of literature and art, Hazlitt's extensive body of work is currently little read, and the majority of his writings remain out of print. During his lifetime, however, he was a central figure in contemporary cultural circles, befriending many of the most influential writers and thinkers of the nineteenth-century literary canon. His social and intellectual network included Charles and Mary Lamb, the French novelist Stendhal, and the seminal Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats, placing him at the very heart of his era's creative revolution.
