Television, despite its enormous presence, turns out to have added pitifully few lines to the communal memory.

Justin Kaplan (September 5 1925 New York) is an American writer and editor. Kaplan married author Anne Bernays in 1954. The two have written a double memoir entitled Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York as well as The Language of Names (1997).

He is best known for biography including Samuel Clemens Lincoln Steffens and Walt Whitman.