Justin Kaplan

Justin Daniel "Joe" Kaplan (September 5, 1925 – March 2, 2014) was an American writer and editor. He was best known as a biographer, particularly of Samuel Clemens, Lincoln Steffens, and Walt Whitman.

Life

Kaplan received his bachelor of science degree from Harvard University in 1945. After pursuing a post-graduate degree for two years, he left graduate school to work for the publishing house Simon & Schuster, where he eventually became a senior editor.

Kaplan left publishing for writing in 1959 and began work on his first biography, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, a study of the famous author that was published in 1966. The book was a critical success, winning both the National Book Award in category Arts and Letters^[1] and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.^[2] He followed this up with two more well-received biographies, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974), and Walt Whitman: A Life (1980), which won a National Book Award in category Autobiography/Biography.^{[3][lower-alpha 1]}

In 2006, Kaplan published When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age. He also edited several anthologies and the 16th and 17th editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1992, 2002).

Kaplan married author Anne Bernays in 1954. The two wrote a double memoir entitled Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York, as well as The Language of Names (1997). They lived in Cambridge and Truro, Massachusetts.^[4]

Kaplan died at the age of 88 on March 2, 2014. He had Parkinson's disease.^[5]

Notes

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