Review
“Well proportioned, persuasive in its judgments and consistently, grippingly readable.” —The New York Times
“Kaplan has spent ten years preparing and writing this book; his achievement is as rare, as wonderful, as the Dickens he brings to life. We are all the beneficiaries of this exceptional biography.” —Los Angeles Times “Dickens by Fred Kaplan may do for our greatest writer after Shakespeare what Ellman did for Oscar Wilde . . . A brilliantly readable work and one essential for all of us who care about the man who, for all his faults, remained ‘The Inimitable’ and ‘The Sparkler’ to the end.” —The Spectator “Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Mr. Kaplan’s biography is its picture of Dickens’s professional life and friendships: one senses anew the extraordinary competitive vigor of the Victorian imperial personality. Mr. Kaplan’s objective presentation of the facts about the colossus of the age gives us a far better sense of its shape and scale than any facile charm might conjure up. His clarity is the highest form of respect and affection for his astonishing subject.” —The Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Fred Kaplan (b. 1937) has written biographies of Charles Dickens, Henry James, Abraham Lincoln, Gore Vidal, and Mark Twain, as well as Sacred Tears, a study of sentimentality in Victorian literature. His biography Thomas Carlyle (1983) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Kaplan is distinguished professor emeritus of English at both Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
