Short answers, pulled from the story.
Samuel Johnson is best known for A Dictionary of the English Language, published in April 1755, which contained 42,773 entries and approximately 114,000 literary quotations. It was the most used and imitated English dictionary for 150 years, until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928.
Samuel Johnson displayed signs consistent with Tourette syndrome throughout his life, including involuntary tics, repetitive movements, and vocalizations documented in detail by James Boswell and others. A posthumous diagnosis was first formally made in a 1967 report, and researcher Arthur K. Shapiro described Johnson as "the most notable example of a successful adaptation to life despite the liability of Tourette syndrome".
Samuel Johnson died on the evening of the 13th of December 1784 at George Strahan's home in Islington, London, at the age of 75. He was buried on the 20th of December 1784 at Westminster Abbey.
Samuel Johnson first met James Boswell on the 16th of May 1763 in the bookshop of Tom Davies in London. They became close companions, travelled to Scotland together in 1773, and Boswell went on to write The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD (1791), which the scholar Walter Jackson Bate selected as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
Johnson signed his contract to produce the Dictionary on the 18th of June 1746 and completed it in eight years, publishing it in April 1755. He had initially claimed he could finish in three years, contrasting himself with the forty scholars of the Academie Francaise who spent forty years on their own dictionary.
Johnson wrote the poem London (1738), the biography Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), the philosophical novella Rasselas (1759), The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), and Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-1781), a series of critical biographies covering 52 poets. He also published 208 essays in The Rambler series during the 1750s.