American · 1925–2014
Justin Kaplan (1925-2014) was an American biographer and editor. Born in New York City, he studied at Harvard and worked as an editor at Simon & Schuster before turning to writing full time. His first book, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966), won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award. He later wrote Lincoln Steffens: A Biography and Walt Whitman: A Life (1980), which won the National Book Award. He also wrote When the Astors Owned New York and the bestselling Bartlett's Familiar Quotations editions, serving as general editor of the sixteenth edition in 1992 and the seventeenth in 2002. He taught at Harvard and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, the writer Anne Bernays. Kaplan wrote narrative biography that reads like fiction and treated his subjects' public personas as part of their work. His Twain and Whitman books remain standard lives of both writers.