When Aileen Ward's John Keats: The Making of a Poet was published in 1963, the praise was immediate. Carlos Baker, writing for the New York Times Book Review (8 September 1963), called it "the best informed, most thoroughly thought through and certainly the most engaging of the modern biographies of Keats." David Daiches concluded that the book displayed "the kind of unobtrusive sympathy that is one of the best gifts of the biographer." John Keats earned for Ward the 1963 Duff Cooper Memorial Prize (awarded for the first time to a woman and an American) and the 1964 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in England; in the United States it garnered the 1964 National Book Award in Arts and Letters.

Aileen Ward was born on 1 April 1919 in Newark, New Jersey. The daughter of Waldron Merry Ward, an attorney, and Aline Coursen Ward, she received her B.A. from Smith College in 1940, taking highest honors in...