Justin Kaplan: Award-winning author hailed for his innovative biographies of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain

Kaplan in 1980: he eschewed the conventional chronological approach to biography (The Washington Post)

Justin Kaplan brought elan to the art of biography with his prize-winning books on writers Mark Twain, Lincoln Steffens and Walt Whitman.

He also injected the voice of popular culture into an updated version of the reference work Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

After he had worked as an editor in New York, Kaplan’s first book was Mr Clemens and Mark Twain (1966), which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He published only two more full-length biographies: Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974), about the muck-raking journalist, and Walt Whitman: A Life (1980). Both were multi-layered character studies set within the colourful tapestry of the times and brought him acclaim as a master of the form.

One of Kaplan’s innovations was to make biography a form of dramatic storytelling, rather than to approach it as strict chronological record; he said the traditional biographies bored him. In his biography of Twain, Kaplan didn’t describe the writer’s birth in 1835. Instead, the book opens when Twain is 31, after years of knockabout apprenticeship in the American West. Kaplan’s biography of Whitman, which received the American Book Award, begins in the poet’s old age, long after his provocative collection Leaves of Grass.

Since childhood Kaplan had read for pleasure Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. In 1988 he began updating it. He read through all 25,000 quotations, excising several thousand. Forgotten 19th-century poets were dropped in favour of the likes of Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Jimi Hendrix and Erica Jong.

Justin Daniel Kaplan, author: born New York 5 September 1925; married 1954 Anne Bernays (three daughters); died 2 March 2014.

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