Park Honan's goal when writing each of his biographies has been to be definitive--that is, to create biographies that will be the standard references in their fields. In his biographies of Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Jane Austen he has succeeded, with most scholars and critics agreeing that each biography reveals more about its subject than has any previous one. Honan combines a multitude of previously unpublished facts about the personal lives and careers of his subjects with a narrative style that presents details in a coherent and fluid manner, thus pleasing general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. In so doing he has become a significant theorist about the function of literary biography and has reshaped modern views of the personalities of his subjects.

Leonard Hobart Park Honan was born on 17 September 1928 in Utica, New York, and was raised in Bronxville. His father was William Francis Honan, a...