Park Honan

He wrote widely on the lives of authors and poets and published important biographies of such writers as Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

[1] His father died in 1935, when Honan was seven years old, leaving his mother to raise their sons alone; she rented a small house in Bronxville, New York, where she felt the public schools were excellent.

There he met, and in 1952 married, a French Fulbright scholar,[3] Jeannette nee Colin (died 2009), and the couple eventually had three children: Corinna, a writer and editor, and twins Matthew and Natasha.

[1][4][7] Honan produced several "scrupulously researched and often revelatory biographies"[2] of subjects ranging from the Elizabethan period to the 20th century, drawing on previously unseen sources to reveal new facts, addressing his books "as much to the general reader as to the specialist.

"[2] In addition to extensive work on Browning, numerous essays and contributions to various anthologies and collections, he wrote biographies of Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

[4] According to his obituary in The Telegraph, "Honan passionately believed that a writer's life, family, friends and social background could all shed light on the work.

[14][5] Kirk H. Beetz wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that "Honan combines a multitude of previously unpublished facts about the personal lives and careers of his subjects with a narrative style that presents details in a coherent and fluid manner, thus pleasing general as well as scholarly readers".

[1] Honan described his intention thus: "One of the main efforts of our time has been to write contextualized biographies attentive to feeling as well as to ideas, objective and yet close, rooted in an 'historical present', alive to childhood, creativity, growth, and above all painstakingly accurate and not self-indulgent.

"[10] David Lodge wrote in The Guardian that Honan's work has "the effect, for the reader, of accompanying the biographical subject as she or he moves through time and space.

"[2] Oakes found the Shakespeare biography "especially skillful in working up a full-bodied portrait of the man from Stratford ... for under Honan's ministrations the evidence proved to be more plentiful than one might initially suspect.

"[16] Lodge explained that "by widening the focus of his study to take in all kinds of data about the social, historical, familial and topographical context of the playwright's life ... a more rounded portrait than the received one could be inferred.