"I spent a lot of time as a boy playing in Central Park and walking around Manhattan by myself," he recalled in a 1981 Boston Globe interview.

[2] He was raised by an older brother and the family's West Indian housekeeper, who taught him to cook, which later came in handy when his wife Anne Bernays turned out to be a self-described "domestic illiterate".

He then began to work as an editor for the publishing house Simon & Schuster, where after eight years he rose to senior editor, becoming known as "the house brain", handling brainier authors including British philosopher Bertrand Russell, "Zorba the Greek" author Nikos Kazantzakis, and sociologist C. Wright Mills.

[It was] not surprising to see editors staying long after hours to talk books, trade industry gossip, and joke over office bottles of Scotch and gin.

In the days before it was absorbed into a conglomerate the house was like a summer camp for intellectually hyperactive children", only without a curfew, reminiscing about dancing at a party with Marilyn Monroe, "gently kneading the little tire of baby fat around her waist."

1930), daughter of public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays and writer Doris E. Fleischman, and great-niece of Sigmund Freud.

[8] A stylish account of the Missouri-born humorist who attempted imperfectly to fit in with the Eastern elite, it was immediately praised as a landmark in Twain scholarship, making fans of E.L. Doctorow, Tom Wolfe et al. and becoming a standard biography.

"To the end he remained as much an enigma and prodigy to himself as he was to the thousands at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York who filed past the casket, topped with a single wreath of laurel, where he lay in a white suit."

(last line) Thomas Lask wrote that "Not in years has there been a biography in which the complexities of human character have been exposed with such perceptiveness, with such a grasp of their contradictory nature, with such ability to keep each strand clear and yet make it contribute to the overall fabric."

“Every day, I look over my shoulder because I have the sense people think I’m goofing off.”[2] No goof-off, Kaplan began reading through all 25,000 quotations, weeding out some 3,500 obscure or unmemorable quotations from forgotten 19th century poets et al. and replacing them with more recent quotations from Elvis Presley, Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky (“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”) Erich Segal (“Love means never having to say you're sorry”), musicians including James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and Michael Jackson, feminists including Susan Brownmiller (“Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe”), Erica Jong, and Germaine Greer (“Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”), leftists including Philip Caputo (“You’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy”) and Toni Morrison (“At no point in my life have I ever felt as though I were American”), novelists including Milan Kundera, Chinua Achebe, and Anthony Burgess, entertainment figures including Garrison Keillor, Mel Brooks, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Sesame Street (“Me want a cookie”), and Woody Allen (Sex - “It’s the most fun I’ve ever had without laughing”), and films including E.T.

The back cover lists 10 quotations selected from the more than 20,000 found inside, by Gloria Steinem, Steve Biko, Grace Slick, and fans of Star Trek.

[17] Bowing to the critics, he included in the 2002 edition Reagan’s memorable 1987 demand during a speech at the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall: “Tear down this wall!”[18] Joe and Anne wrote a double memoir The Language of Names (1997), and Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York (2002), in which they referred to themselves as "children of privilege" who went to progressive schools and were "grounded in a classical approach to education — a lot of memorizing and Shakespeare, an exhaustive approach to history, literature, and the sciences."