Robert Bernard Martin was born September 11, 1918, in La Harpe, Illinois, to Carl and Maggie Martin. He lived in Iowa from 1923 until he left for the Army in 1944. He graduated from high school in Davenport and received his A.B. summa cum laude from the University of Iowa in 1943. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in Italy and France. After the war he received a Master's degree at Harvard and a B.Litt. in English at Oxford University, where he was a Fulbright scholar. He taught in the English department at Princeton from 1951 to 1975. After his retirement he moved to Oxford, England, where he became a writer. He published ten books about the Victorian era, including biographies such as Tennyson, the Unquiet Heart in 1980 and A Very Private Life in 1991. He also published four mystery novels as Robert Bernard. He wrote more than 150 reviews and articles for such publications as the New York Times Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and TLS. Robert Martin died in Madison, Wisconsin, on November 29, 1999. Source: Press Citizen obituary, December 3, 1999.