Justin Kaplan
| Justin Kaplan | |
|---|---|
| Born | Justin Daniel Kaplan September 5, 1925 Manhattan, New York, US |
| Died | March 2, 2014 (aged 88) Cambridge, Massachusetts, US |
| Occupation | Biographer, Editor |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | non-fiction |
| Spouse | Anne Bernays (1930-) (1954-2014; 3 children) |
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Justin Daniel "Joe" Kaplan (September 5, 1925 in Manhattan, New York City – March 2, 2014 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American writer and editor. The general editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (16th and 17th eds.), he was best known as a biographer, particularly of Samuel Clemens, Lincoln Steffens, and Walt Whitman.
The son of Tobias D. Kaplan, a successful shirt manufacturer in New York City, and Anna (Rudman) Kaplan, a homemaker, Kaplan was born in Manhattan. Both of his parents died by the time he was nine. “I spent a lot of time as a boy playing in Central Park and walking around Manhattan by myself,” he recalled in a 1981 Boston Globe interview. He was raised by an older brother and the family’s West Indian housekeeper, who taught him to cook, which later came in handy when his wife Anne Bernays turned out to be a self-described “domestic illiterate”.
A top student, Kaplan entered Harvard University at age 16, receiving his bachelor's in English in 1944. After pursuing a post-graduate degree in English for two years, he grew dissatisfied with graduate school and moved to New Mexico. “The openness and the beauty of the Southwest,” he said in the 1981 interview, “made me aware of American writers in a way I had never considered before.”
He then began to work as an editor for the publishing house Simon & Schuster, where after eight years he rose to senior editor, becoming known as "the house brain", handling brainier authors including British philosopher Bertrand Russell "Zorba the Greek" author Nikos Kazantzakis, and sociologist C. Wright Mills. Fascinated by words and language, by his early 20s Kapalan had edited translations of Plato and Aristotle. In his memoir Back Then (2002) Kaplan wrote: "It was fun to work at Simon & Schuster. [It was] not surprising to see editors staying long after hours to talk books, trade industry gossip, and joke over office bottles of Scotch and gin. In the days before it was absorbed into a conglomerate the house was like a summer camp for intellectually hyperactive children", only without a curfew, reminiscing about dancing at a party with Marilyn Monroe, “gently kneading the little tire of baby fat around her waist.”
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