Book Description
A deeply reflective memoir weaving together the personal story of Hester Kaplan’s acclaimed biographer father and his fraught effect on her artistic development with a rich portrait of twentieth century intellectual life and a meditation on family intimacy, identity, and the art of writing
Twice Born opens with the death of Hester’s father, Justin Kaplan, known for his award-winning biographies of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Despite his relatively prolific output, Justin rarely wrote, or said, much about himself—even to his daughter. Standing at his open casket, Hester has the realization that while alive, her father never looked her in the eyes.
Hester takes on the challenge of piecing together as intimate a biography of her own father as possible, comparing his story to the lives of his biographical subjects and dissecting the various personas he presents to the world—from which the name “dad,” “daddy,” or even “father” is conspicuously and painfully absent. Parallel to Justin’s story runs Hester’s own journey of development as a writer and a thinker, which begins in the shadow of not only her talented father, but also her novelist mother, and the fiercely protective union the two of them had built, often to the exclusion of their own children.
In sensitive, intimate writing, Kaplan paints a rich picture of the twentieth century literary world that she grew up in, all while reflecting on the deceptive nature of memory, the loneliness of creative pursuits, and the dovetailing paradoxes of biographical and autobiographical writing.
Praise For This Book
"Hester Kaplan does with memoir what her acclaimed father Justin did with biography—finds the right subject, makes it new, and teaches us how to write with great compassion and grace." —Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"Justin Kaplan was a brilliant biographer and a role model for many of us. In this intimate and unflinching look at her oh-so-private father, Hester Kaplan makes clear she has inherited Justin's genes for understated, artful and illuminating narrative." —Larry Tye, author of Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon
"In this acutely observed, beautifully drawn portrait, Hester Kaplan searches for her eminent biographer father through his work—especially on Mark Twain—as well as through his silences, secrets, and her own vivid memories. And with deep imaginative empathy, she finds him." —Jean Strouse, author of Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
"While the course of a life once lived cannot be changed, its meaning can be, and that magic happens here. A loving daughter draws on a deep well of feeling, and a skilled writer draws on hard-earned wisdom, to bring irresistibly to life the ingenious but wounded figures of her unforgotten father, of his greatest subject—and of Hester Kaplan herself, who is every bit their match. Exquisite biography. Heart-rending memoir. Twice born. Twice blest.” —James Carroll, author of An American Requiem
"A magnificent combination of memoir and biography, Twice Born is a work of reconciliation and a resurrection of the extraordinary man who gave us Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and at last, through his daughter’s magic, his own passionate heart." —Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
