Fred Kaplan's biographies of Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens are part of a projected biographical quartet charting the sweep of Anglo-American culture from the Romantic to the modern era. Kaplan is committed to biography as a literary form and draws upon the techniques of narrative art; he aspires to combine the power and dramatic resources of narrative prose and the rigorous intellectual requirements of historical literary scholarship and cultural analysis.

Born in New York on 4 November 1937, the son of an attorney, Isaac Kaplan, who was the first member of his family to go to college, and of Bessie Zwirn Kaplan, Fred Kaplan grew up in the lower-middle-class environment of third-generation Jewish Ashkenazic immigrant culture, first in the Bronx and then in Brooklyn, where his family moved when he was ten. He was one of four sons, the other three of whom became lawyers. His avid reading of novels...