Justin Kaplan has produced three notable literary biographies: Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966), for which he won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize; Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974), a life of the famous muckraking journalist and autobiographer; and Walt Whitman: A Life (1980), widely regarded as the best Whitman biography in a long line of superb works on the poet. He is now editing the sixteenth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, to be published by Little, Brown in 1992.

Justin Kaplan was born on 5 September 1925 in New York City to Tobias D. Kaplan, a manufacturer, and Anna Rudman Kaplan. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, the young Kaplan received his B.S. in 1945 from Harvard, where he then pursued graduate studies. He lectured there in 1969, 1973, 1976, and 1978; but he has devoted most of his professional life to editing and, since 1959, to full-time writing, which Kaplan reluctantly decided was incompatible with teaching...