Izaak Walton | English biographer

On December 15, 1683, Izaak Walton, English biographer and author (The Compleat Angler), died at the age of 90. From the article:

"Izaak Walton | English biographer
Izaak Walton, (born August 9, 1593, Stafford, Staffordshire, England—died December 15, 1683, Winchester, Hampshire), English biographer and author of The Compleat Angler (1653), a pastoral discourse on the joys and stratagems of fishing that has been one of the most frequently reprinted books in English literature.

Izaak Walton, detail of an oil painting by Jacob Huysmans, c. 1675; in the National Portrait Gallery, London
Izaak Walton, detail of an oil painting by Jacob Huysmans, c. 1675; in the National Portrait Gallery, London Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

Izaak Walton
Quick Facts
Izaak Walton, detail of an oil painting by Jacob Huysmans, c. 1675; in the National Portrait Gallery, London
died
subjects of study
After a few years of schooling, Walton was apprenticed to a kinsman in the linendrapers’ trade in London, where he acquired a small shop of his own and began to prosper. Despite his modest education he read widely, developed scholarly tastes, and associated with men of learning. Walton lived and worked close to St. Dunstan’s Church, and he became active in parish affairs and a friend and fishing companion of the vicar, John Donne. Donne died in 1631, and, when his poems were published two years later, Walton composed “An Elegie” for the volume. In 1640 he wrote The Life and Death of Dr. Donne to accompany a collection of Donne’s sermons. The Life was revised and enlarged in 1658.

Walton married in 1626, and his wife, Rachel, gave birth to seven children. None of the children survived past the age of three, however, and Rachel herself died in 1642. Five years later Walton married Anne Ken (the half-sister of Thomas Ken), with whom he had three children (one of whom died in infancy). During the English Civil Wars (1642–51), Walton was a staunch Royalist. After the Royalist defeat at Worcester in 1651, he took part in a successful adventure to preserve a jewel belonging to Charles II. He spent the remainder of his life reading, writing and editing, fishing, and visiting among the eminent clergymen who were his friends.

The second of Walton’s biographies, The Life of Sir Henry Wotton (the poet and diplomat), appeared in 1651. Two years later the work that made Walton immortal, The Compleat Angler, or, the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, was published. Walton enlarged and improved the work through four subsequent editions, a quest for perfection also evident in repeated revisions of the biographies. He wrote The Life of Mr. Richard Hooker (the Elizabethan bishop) in 1665 and revised it the next year. In 1670 he issued The Life of Mr. George Herbert (the poet), and in the same year he brought out an edition containing all four lives."