21 Facts About Park Honan

Leonard Hobart Park Honan was an American academic and author who spent most of his career in the UK.

Park Honan 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.

Park Honan began his career specializing in Victorian literature but later broadened his scope, becoming an expert in the Elizabethan period.

Park Honan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Park Honan's brother was the journalist William Honan, who became culture editor of The New York Times.

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Park Honan's 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.

Park Honan earned a scholarship to Deep Springs College, a small school in the California desert.

Park Honan continued to work in a variety of jobs, including as a publisher in New York.

Park Honan was drafted into the US army at the end of the Korean War, but as a conscientious objector, he refused to fight.

Park Honan was jailed briefly, but allowed to serve in a non-combat role in France.

Park Honan moved with his wife and baby daughter to England in 1956 to study at the University of London, gaining the degree of Ph.

Park Honan produced several "scrupulously researched and often revelatory biographies" of subjects ranging from the Elizabethan period to the 20th century, drawing on previously unseen sources to reveal new facts, addressing his books "as much to the general reader as to the specialist.

Park Honan was later interested in modernist writers and at the time of his death he had begun a biography of T S Eliot.

Park Honan served on the editorial board of journals covering Browning and the Ohio University Press edition of Browning's complete works, as well as the journals Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction, among many others.

Park Honan began his teaching career as an assistant professor of English at Connecticut College in 1959, where his wife taught in the French department.

Park Honan relocated permanently to England, where he became a Lecturer at the University of Birmingham in 1968, remaining there as a Senior Lecturer, then Reader in English, until 1983.

Park Honan was appointed Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Leeds in January 1985 and retired in 1993 with the title Emeritus Professor.

In 1998 Park Honan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Park Honan was given a Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1962.

Park Honan described his intention thus: "One of the main efforts of our time has been to write contextualized biographies attentive to feeling as well as to ideas, objective and yet close, rooted in an 'historical present', alive to childhood, creativity, growth, and above all painstakingly accurate and not self-indulgent.

Park Honan "had a lifelong interest in drama and his work demonstrates a dramatist's skill at bringing personalities to life.