Walter Jackson Bate (May 23, 1918 – July 26, 1999) was an American literary critic and biographer.

[1] Samuel Johnson also won the 1978 U.S. National Book Award in Biography.

He studied under Douglas Bush and later taught at Harvard University.

His biographies of Keats and Johnson have enjoyed extraordinary reputations both as scholarly resources and as works of literature in their own right.

[3][4] Bate retired from teaching at Harvard in 1986, and died on July 26, 1999, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, aged 81.