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In 1944 Joseph Wood Krutch produced the first modern biography of Johnson, which is notable for the careful analysis it provides of Johnson's own works, including his essays. Arthur Sherbo, Edward Bloom, A. Elder, and others deepened appreciation for Johnson's accomplishment as an essayist, as well as his influence on the essay tradition. With a simple yet important bit of basic research, R. Wiles showed in 1968 that the circulation of the Rambler essays, in reprints and excerpts, was much greater than Johnson knew. In the 1970s and 1980s, a series of studies examined Johnson's rhetoric.
In a particularly important essay, Leopold Damrosch in 1973 saw Johnson "dismantling" commonplaces in an effort "to make us stop parroting the precepts of moralists and start thinking for ourselves. Johnson is thus engaged in teaching his reader how to think. The insights of Damrosch and White seem to apply primarily to those essays Johnson called "professedly serious," and it is worth noting the wide variety of writing actually contained in the Rambler , Idler , and Adventurer : literary criticism and theory (the essays on Milton are especially interesting), Oriental tales, epistolary short fiction, allegories, and dream visions. Steven Lynn in Samuel Johnson After Deconstruction (1992) describes the reader's experience of the Rambler as a sequential series, noting (among other things) how Johnson reshapes the reader's sense of the Spectator 's priority, how the movement of various essays anticipates and surpasses deconstruction, and how the careful patterning of the various essays brings the reader again and again to the brink of religious faith - thus carrying out the pious intention Johnson declared at the series' outset. For the modern reader, Johnson's essays are likely to seem rigorous, intense, and strikingly eloquent. They generally demand the reader's active attention, but even the most rigorous essays are not without a subtle humor.

And the stories of Dick Minim (a lousy critic), Dick Linger (a sluggish soul), Tom Tempest and Jack Sneaker (political fanatics), and many other characters are both amusing and instructive. Johnson deals generally with "known truths," moral insights that the reader is already quite familiar with, but has perhaps stopped acting upon, or applying, or questioning. The movement of his essays as well as the style serve to enliven the reader's attention. As Donald Greene (1989) has pointed out, the idea of "Johnson's prose style," as if he had only one, is mistaken. In his published essays, however, Johnson does tend toward quite poetic effects of balance, parallelism, alliteration, and imagery. The notion that Johnson's prose is verbose or padded, a widespread idea in the 19th century, is easily negated by anyone who reads him without prejudice.
Here for instance are the first two sentences of the Rambler :The difficulty of the first address on any new occasion, is felt by every man in his transactions with the world, and confessed by the settled and regular forms of salutation which necessity has introduced into all languages. The first sentence efficiently sets up the problem - how does one open a channel of communication? This sentence may appear, at first glance, wordy: it does have eight prepositional phrases. The reader who attempts to shorten it without loss or alteration of meaning will quickly discover, however, the efficiency of Johnson's prose. The second sentence suggests a miniature allegory in which the figure of "Judgment" deliberates (like Rasselas and many other Johnsonian characters) over the choice of introduction, and finally decides arbitrarily. The sentence's final construction reflects this balance, as "the allurement of novelty" is traded for "the security of prescription.

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