jameskaplan.net

James Kaplan has been writing nonfiction, journalism, and biography for over four decades. His essays and reviews, as well as more than a hundred major profiles of figures ranging from Madonna to Nicholson Baker, Ralph Lauren to John Updike, Miles Davis to Meryl Streep, and Arthur Miller to Larry David, have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and New York. His most recent book, Irving Berlin: New York Genius, was published in 2019 by Yale University Press.

His first novel, Pearl's Progress, was published by Knopf in 1989. His nonfiction portrait of John F. Kennedy International Airport, The Airport (1994) — called "a splendid book" by Gay Talese — remains a classic of aviation literature and New York storytelling. His second novel, Two Guys From Verona (1998), was chosen by The New York Times as one of its Notable Books of the Year. 

In 2002, Kaplan co-authored the autobiography of John McEnroe, You Cannot Be Serious, which was an international bestseller (and number one on The New York Times list). His 2005 book Dean and Me: A Love Story, co-written with Jerry Lewis and published by Doubleday, was a New York Times bestseller as well. And in 2016, Kaplan co-wrote Marina Abramovic's memoir Walk Through Walls, published by Crown.

In 2010, Doubleday published Frank: The Voice, the first volume of Kaplan's definitive biography of Frank Sinatra. The book was also a New York Times bestseller, and was chosen by Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani as one of her Top Ten Books of 2010. In 2012, James Kaplan was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for nonfiction. In October 2015, Doubleday published the bestselling second volume of Kaplan's Frank Sinatra biography, Sinatra: The Chairman, winner of the Biographers International Organization's Award for Excellence in Biography. 

James Kaplan lives in Westchester, New York with his wife and three sons.