Justin Kaplan

From Philosopedia

Kaplan, Justin (5 September 1925— )

Kaplan, who was born in New York City, was graduated from Harvard University with a B. S. in 1944.

Leaving graduate school in 1946, he was employed by Simon and Schuster as a senior editor, working with authors such as Bertrand_Russell, Will_Durant, Nikos_ Kazantzakis, and C._Wright_Mills.

In 1956, his The Pocket Aristotle was published.

In 1959 he wrote his first book, a biography of Mark Twain entitled Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966), which won both a Pulitzer Prize (1967) and a National Book Award. He had begun the biography by starting with Clemens's being 31, a strategy then used by others.

His Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974) is about the prominent journalist and muckraker of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1976 his Dialogues of Plato was published.

Walt Whitman: A Life came out in 1980.

Other of his works: Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (1991); When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age (2007).

Kaplan has lectured at Harvard and at Emerson College, Boston, and was biographer in residence at the Institute for Modern Biography at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. He has edited several anthologies and was general editor for the 16th edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1992).

Asked about humanism, he responded in 1989:

• I’m uncomfortable with broad, over-used terms such as “humanism” (except in a purely historical sense) and even more uncomfortable with sub-species such as “theistic” and “secular.” But if, on pain of death, I had to assign specific values to “humanism” in general I’d list free inquiry, tolerance, and concern and then pray for relief.

Kaplan married author Anne Bernays in 1954 and has written a double memoir with her entitled Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York.

Kaplan and Bernays live in Cambridge and Truro, Massachusetts.

{WAS, 10 April 1989}