Word: kaplan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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NONFICTION: American Dreams, Studs Terkel ∙ The Girl I Left Behind, Jane O'Reilly ∙ Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong ∙ Naming Names, Victor Navasky ∙ Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers ∙ Walt Whitman, Justin Kaplan ∙ Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling, Raymond Sokolov...
...Lippmann and the American Century by Ronald Steel. The dean of U.S. pundits revealed as a fallible man. American Dreams: Lost and Found by Studs Terkel. The latest chorus of voices of hope and trouble, edited and affectionately arranged by the oral historian. Walt Whitman: A Life by Justin Kaplan. A thorough, artful analysis of the first all-American poet, by the author of the Pulitzer prizewinning Mister Clemens and Mark Twain...
...make some one more vivid hi their minds. Where would baseball be without Goose, hockey without Boom Boom, football without Mean Joe? Common criminals would sound like common criminals were there no Machine Gun, Killer or Mad Dog among them. Not that all gangster names are so picturesque. Nathan Kaplan's monicker was "Kid Dropper" for reasons too awful to contemplate. And Al Capone was known as the Millionaire Gorilla, though it is hard to picture some floozie chucking him under the chin and cooing, "Come on, you big, bad Millionaire Gorilla...
This is by far the most analytical the author becomes, and it bespeaks the enthusiasm of the biography. Kaplan believes that Whitman must be understood on his own terms, and this recognition allows the poet and his voice to emerge naturally out of the biographical narrative. Whenever Kaplan does choose to intervene, he enhances his portrait with appropriate comparisions, or soft-spoken but astute analysis. In one case, Kaplan contrasts a friendship between Whitman and an intimate acquaintance, Peter Doyle, to Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in the cabmen's shelter in Ulysses, and Nathanial West's own "Peter Doyle" holding...
WITH SUCH dexterity and literary aplomb, the author justifies another Whitman biography. Though the first was written in 1850, even before Leaves of Grass, and many have followed, Kaplan's biography creates the density of Whitman's life in contemporary terms and with the aid of new materials--previoulsy unavailable private papers of Whitman and his friends--available to him. At a time when America questions whether or not it is still the light of the world, it refreshes and reassures to discover a man who did beleive in the President as a redeemer, and democracy as a catalyst...