Edmond Malone (1741-1812) was the greatest early editor of Shakespeare's works, the first historian of early English drama, the biographer of Shakespeare, Dryden and Reynolds, and a relentless exposer of literary fraud and forgery. His dedication to discovering the facts of literary history through manuscripts and early editions laid the foundations for the scholar's code and the modern study of literature. Yet he was also a gregarious man, attracting many friends and enemies among his contemporaries. This first modern full-length biography of Edmond Malone illuminates in a unique way both the intensely private world of the scholar and the highly public world of the late eighteenth-century artistic, intellectual and political elite, including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sarah Siddons and James Boswell.