In 1988 after planned biographies of Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant and acting legend Charlie Chaplin fell through, Kaplan took a job as general editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations to update the 15th (1980) edition, “a job akin to running the admissions committee of the most selective college in the world" (New York Times), which he was ideally suited for, editing the 16th and 17th editions (1992, 2002). “It’s every writer’s dream,” he said in a 1990 Boston Globe interview. “Every day, I look over my shoulder because I have the sense people think I’m goofing off.” No goof-off, Kaplan began reading through all 25,000 quotations, weeding out some 3,500 obscure or unmemorable quotations from forgotten 19th century poets et al. and replacing them with more recent quotations from Elvis Presley, Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky (“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”) Erich Segal (“Love means never having to say you're sorry”), musicians including James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and Michael Jackson, feminists including Susan Brownmiller (“Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe”), Erica Jong, and Germaine Greer (“Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”), leftists including Philip Caputo (“You’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy”) and Toni Morrison (“At no point in my life have I ever felt as though I were American”),novelists including Milan Kundera, Chinua Achebe, and Anthony Burgess, entertainment figures including Garrison Keillor, Mel Brooks, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Sesame Street (“Me want a cookie”), and Woody Allen (Sex - “It’s the most fun I’ve ever had without laughing”), and films including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (“ET phone home”), and Apocalypse Now (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory.”).