The best two biographies of Keats are:
Bate, Walter J. John Keats. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963.
Ward, Aileen. John Keats; the Making of a Poet. New York: Viking Press, 1963.
George Keats is born.
Tom Keats is born.
Edward Keats is born.
Edward Keats dies.
In December, the Keats family moves to the Swan and Hoop Inn and Stables. Thomas and Frances Keats take over the business from Keats' grandfather.
Frances Mary (Fanny) Keats is born.
John and George attend John Clarke's school in Enfield. This is a boarding school about twelve miles north of London.
After visiting John and George at Enfield, Thomas Keats is killed by a fall from his horse.
Frances Keats marries William Rawlings, and the children go to live with their maternal grandparents at Enfield.
John's grandfather dies. After his death Frances disappears for over three years, leaving the children with their grandmother in Lower Edmonton, a suburb of London.
Frances returns to the family; she now has tuberculosis. John tends to her.
Frances dies of tuberculosis. John's grandmother turns over care of the children to a guardian, Richard Abbey, a businessman from London.
Apprenticed to Thomas Hammond, an apothecary-surgeon. In 1811, completes a prose translation of The Aeneid, begun at school.
Writes first poetry. In December his grandmother dies, and the family home is broken up.
Enters Guy's Hospital, London, for further medical training.
On May 5 his first published poem, "O Solitude," appears in Leigh Hunt's Examiner. In October writes "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," published in December. Meets Hunt, Benjamin Haydon, John Hamilton Reynolds, and Shelley. By the spring of 1817, gives up the idea of medical practice.
In March, moves with brothers to Hampstead, sees the Elgin Marbles with Haydon, and publishes his first collection, Poems. Composes "Endymion" between April and November. Reads Milton, Shakespeare, and Coleridge and rereads Wordsworth during the year.
"Endymion" is published in April, unfavorably reviewed in September, and defended by Reynolds in October. During the summer goes on walking tour of the lake country and Scotland, but returns to London in mid-August with a sore throat and severe chills. His brother Tom also seriously ill by late summer, dying on December 1. In September, Keats first meets Fanny Brawne. Brother George and bride emigrate to America.
Writes "The Eve of St. Agnes" in January, revises it in September. Fanny Brawne and her mother move into the other half of the double house in which Keats lives in April. During April and May writes "La Belle Sans Merci" and all the major odes except "To Autumn," which is written in September. Rental arrangements force separation from Fanny Brawne during the summer (Keats on Isle of Wight from June to August), and in the fall he tries to break his dependence on her, but they become engaged by Christmas. Earlier in December suffers a recurrence of his sore throat.
In February has a severe hemorrhage and in June an attack of blood-spitting. In July his doctor orders him to Italy for the winter; he sails in September and finally arrives in Rome on November 15. In July a volume of poems are published: Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems. Fanny Brawne nurses him through the late summer.
Dies at 11 P.M., February 23. Buried in the English Cemetery at Rome. News of his death reaches London on March 17.
Barnard, John. John Keats. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Bate, Walter J. John Keats. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1963.
Chilcott, Tim. A Publisher and His Circle: The Life and Work of John Taylor, Keats's Publisher. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1972.
Clarke, Charles C, and Mary C. Clarke. Recollections of Writers. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1878.
Colvin, Sidney. John Keats; His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame. New York: Octagon Books, 1970.
Ford, George H. Keats and the Victorians: A Study of His Influence and Rise to Fame, 1821-1895. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1962.
Gittings, Robert. John Keats. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968.
Hewlett, Dorothy. Adonais: A Life of John Keats. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1937.
Hunt, Leigh. Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. London: H. Colburn, 1966.
———. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt: With Reminiscences of Friends and Contemporaries. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Bros, 1850.
Keats, John, and Richard M. Milnes. Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats. 2 vols. London: E. Moxon, 1848.
Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821. Ed. H. E. Rollins. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958.
———. John Keats. Ed. Elizabeth Cook. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
Lowell, Amy. John Keats. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925.
Marquess, William H. Lives of the Poet: The First Century of Keats Biography. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1985.
Matthews, Geoffrey, ed. Keats: the Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971.
Motion, Andrew. Keats. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Mullan, John, Jennifer Wallace, et. al., eds. Lives of the Great Romantics by Their Contemporaries, II. Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 1997.
Ricks, Christopher. Keats and Embarrassment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
Roe, Nicholas. John Keats and the Culture of Dissent. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Rollins, H. E. The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, and More Letters and Poems of the Keats Circle. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965.
Thompson, A. Hamilton. Selections from the Poems of John Keats. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1915.
Ward, Aileen. John Keats: The Making of a Poet. New York: Viking Press, 1963.