Park Honan, academic and author, born 17 September 1928 in Utica, New York, the son of William Francis Honan, a thoracic surgeon and Annette Neudecker Honan, a journalist. He is now emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Leeds. He is a brother of the journalist William Holmes Honan of the New York Times.
After graduating from Deep Springs College, California, he went on to receive an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1951. He moved to England in 1956 and did his doctorate at the University of London, gaining a Ph.d on Robert Browning in 1959. Since 1984 he had occupied the chair in English and American Literature at the University of Leeds, where he is now emeritus professor.[1]
Honan has produced several academic biographies of diverse writers, ranging from the Elizabethan period to the 19th century. In addition to extensive work on Browning, he has written biographies of Jane Austen, Matthew Arnold, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. He has also edited an anthology of Beat Generation writers.
In 1998 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature [2]