Park Honan

Leonard Hobart Park Honan (17 September 1928 – 27 September 2014) was an American academic and author who spent most of his career in the UK. 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.

Honan began his career specializing in Victorian literature but later broadened his scope, becoming an expert in the Elizabethan period. From 1959, he taught at Connecticut College and then Brown University before relocating permanently to England in 1968, where he taught at the University of Birmingham until becoming Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Leeds in 1984. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Early life and education Honan was born in Utica, New York, the son of William Francis Honan, a thoracic surgeon of Irish descent, and Annette Neudecker Honan, a journalist of English descent. His brother was the journalist William Honan, who became culture editor of The New York Times. 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. He earned a scholarship to Deep Springs College, a small school in the California desert. While at school, Honan worked as a butcher and a car mechanic, He continued to work in a variety of jobs, including as a publisher in New York. There he met, and in 1952 married, a French Fulbright scholar, Honan was drafted into the US army at the end of the Korean War, but as a conscientious objector, he refused to fight. He was jailed briefly, but allowed to serve in a non-combat role in France. Upon discharge, under the GI Bill, he qualified for a grant to study anywhere he chose.

Career Honan produced several "scrupulously researched and often revelatory biographies" He also edited an anthology of Beat Generation writers. and retired in 1993 with the title Emeritus Professor. The biographer John Batchelor described Honan as "a dazzlingly dramatic lecturer".

In 1998 Honan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). He was given a Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1962.

He died of liver cancer at the age of 86. Paul Vitello, in The New York Times, noted that Honan's biography of Arnold "recast him as one of the most influential progressive voices of Victorian England". Edward T. Oakes called Honan's Austen biography "Marvelous ... succinct ... shrewd". In The Telegraph, Kathryn Hughes wrote that his Austen biography set "a daunting high-water mark" for future biographers.

Selected works Browning's Characters: A Study in Poetic Technique, Yale University Press, 1961 (with William Irvine) The Book, the Ring, & the Poet: A Biography of Robert Browning, McGraw-Hill, 1974 Matthew Arnold: A Life, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981 Jane Austen: Her Life, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1987 Honan, Park (ed.) The Beats: An Anthology of "Beat" Writing, Dent, 1987 Authors' Lives: On Literary Biography and the Arts of Language (collection of essays), St. Martins Press, 1990 Shakespeare: A Life, Oxford University Press 1998 Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy, Oxford University Press 2005