Best known as the author of The Compleat Angler, he also wrote a number of short biographies including one of his friend John Donne.

Though Walton had returned to London by 1650, his experiences at Shallowford provided material for The Compleat Angler: a celebration of the art and spirit of fishing, first published in 1653.

Walton's literary admirers have included Charles Lamb and he gives his name to places and organisations in his native country, the United States, and Kenya.

His father, who was an innkeeper as well as a landlord of a tavern, died before Izaak was three, being buried in February 1596/7[a] as Jarvicus Walton.

[1] Izaak also had a brother named Ambrose, as indicated by an entry in the parish register recording the burial in March 1595/6 of an Ambrosius filius Jervis Walton.

The last forty years of his life were spent visiting eminent clergymen and others who enjoyed fishing, compiling the biographies of people he liked, and collecting information for the Compleat Angler.

He went to live just north of his birthplace, at a spot between the towns of Stafford and Stone, where he had bought some land edged by a small river.

The famous passage about the frog, often misquoted as being about the worm—"use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer"—appears in the original edition.

At any rate, Wotton, who had intended to write the life of John Donne, and had already corresponded with Walton on the subject, left the task to him.

Walton had already contributed an elegy to the 1633 edition of Donne's poems, and he completed and published the life, much to the satisfaction of the most learned critics, in 1640.

Sir Henry Wotton dying in 1639, Walton undertook his life also; it was finished in 1642 and published in 1651 as a preface to the volume Reliquiae Wottonianae.

The cost of Shallowford was £350, and the property included a farmhouse, a cottage, courtyard, garden and nine fields along which a river ran.

Upstairs a collection of fishing related items is displayed, the earliest dating from the mid-eighteenth century, while a room is dedicated to his Lives and The Compleat Angler.

[9] Advertising mogul and land developer Barron Collier founded the Izaak Walton Fly Fishing Club in 1908 at his Useppa Island resort near Fort Myers, Florida.

The Izaak Walton League is an American association formed in 1922 in Chicago, Illinois, to preserve fishing streams.

The Izaak Walton Hotel in the Staffordshire village of Ilam overlooks the River Dove, at the entrance to Dovedale.

There are also two pubs in England named The Izaak Walton: one in the village of East Meon, Hampshire,[11] the other in Cresswell, Staffordshire.

There is an Izaak Walton Inn in Embu, Kenya, overlooking a small stream that feeds into the Rupingazi River.