Writer of award-winning Twain biography
NEW YORK - Justin Kaplan, an author and cultural historian with a taste for trouble making who wrote a definitive, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Mark Twain and spiced the popular canon as general editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, died Sunday night in Cambridge, Mass. at the age of 88.
Kaplan had been suffering for years from Parkinson’s disease, his wife, author Anne Bernays, said Tuesday.
A longtime professor at Harvard University, Kaplan wrote several acclaimed biographies, notably Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. Released in 1966, it was immediately praised as a landmark inTwain scholarship, a stylish and acute account of the rowdy Missouri native and Western humorist.
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer.
Kaplan also wrote books about Walt Whitman and journalist Lincoln Steffens. His other works included a collaboration with Bernays, The Language of Names, and, most recently, When the Astors Owned New York.
In the 1980s, he was hired as general editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and set out to enliven what he believed was a stuffy institution. He included quotes with four-letter words, noting that people wouldn’t be able to talk without them.
Arkansas, Pages 14 on 03/05/2014