I've been reading Walt Whitman: A Life, by Justin Kaplan.
Curious about the author, I googled him and was soon reading this New York Times obituary. I didn't know it, but besides his book on Whitman, Kaplan wrote two other biographies, of Mark Twain and Lincoln Steffens, and it seems that the Twain one, especially, is very highly esteemed: after its publication, in 1966, it won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It starts when Twain is 31, never discusses his birth, and dispenses with the boring genealogical details that one might have thought were required of biographers by worldwide statute. The Whitman biography starts even farther ahead in the subject's life:
In the spring of 1884 the poet Walt Whitman bought a house in the unlovely city of Camden, New Jersey, and at the age of sixty-five slept under his own roof for the first time in his life.
In his later life, Kaplan edited a new Bartlett's Quotations (1992), a task that, according to the obituary, "entailed vast learning and wide reading, both of which he had, as well as an immense circle of associates willing to scare up quotations, which he also had." He cut thousands of quotations on the ground that he "didn't care for withered flowers of poesy" and wouldn't suffer "platitudes, empty pieties, self-evident propositions, commencement oratory, or anything that sounds as though it might have come from the insides of a fortune cookie." These were replaced by the witticisms of such figures as Woody Allen, Jimi Hendrix, and Erica Jong. Conservatives complained, more particularly on the ground that Ronald Reagan, with just a few quotations, was under represented-- to which Kaplan, a self-described liberal, retorted that he'd given Reagan more than his due.
Well, he seems like my kind of fellow, and having a bit of a feel for his life I'm looking forward to the rest of his Whitman.
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