In 1761, Samuel Richardson died in London, bringing to a close the life of one of the English language's most distinctive prose writers and novelists — a career that had combined the craft of fiction with the trade of printing in ways that proved inseparable throughout his working years.

Richardson was born on 19 August 1689, with some sources alternatively recording his birth year as 1687 and the date as 31 July, in Mackworth, Derbyshire. A citizen first of the Kingdom of England and later of the Kingdom of Great Britain, he built a professional life that spanned both the literary and commercial worlds of print. As a book printer, he worked within the material production of written culture, a trade that ran alongside his own activity as a writer and novelist.

Writing in the English language, Richardson produced prose fiction associated with the genre of Sentimentalism. This alignment with Sentimentalism places his work within a broader current of eighteenth-century literature that foregrounded emotional experience and moral reflection in narrative form. His career as a novelist and prose writer established him as a figure whose output engaged the reading public of his era through that particular literary mode, though the precise titles of his works do not appear in the available records consulted here.

The Library of Congress authorized label for Richardson — "Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761" — reflects the scholarly consensus around the dates most widely accepted for his birth and death, lending institutional weight to the 1689 birth year despite the alternate dates that appear in some historical sources. He died on 4 July 1761 in London. His dual role as both a practitioner of the printing trade and an author of prose fiction in the Sentimental genre marks him as a figure whose professional identity was rooted in the written word from multiple directions across his lifetime.