Park Honan

Leonard Hobart Park Honan (17 September 1928 – 27 September 2014) was an American academic and author who spent most of his career in the UK. He wrote widely on the lives of authors and poets and published important biographies of such writers as Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

Honan began his career specializing in Victorian literature but later broadened his scope, becoming an expert in the Elizabethan period. From 1959, he taught at Connecticut College and then Brown University before relocating permanently to England in 1968, where he taught at the University of Birmingham until becoming Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Leeds in 1984. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Honan was born in Utica, New York, the son of William Francis Honan, a thoracic surgeon of Irish descent, and Annette Neudecker Honan, a journalist of English descent. His brother was the journalist William Honan, who became culture editor of The New York Times. His father died in 1935, when Honan was seven years old, leaving his mother to raise their sons alone; she rented a small house in Bronxville, New York, where she felt the public schools were excellent. He earned a scholarship to Deep Springs College, a small school in the California desert. While at school, Honan worked as a butcher and a car mechanic, enjoying horseback riding and fascinated with the local reptiles. Of the butcher job, he said: "My boots used to be awash in four inches of blood in the slaughterhouse. That helped to make me a pacifist."

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