While John Howard is famous as a eighteenth-century English prison reformer, his role in the development of communication with prisoners and social science is under-appreciated. To better understand the latter two topics, I searched for information about John Howard. Howard’s obitutary in Gentleman’s Magazine in 1790 (and ensuing correspondence), Anecdotes of Howard (1790), Life of Howard (1790) and Aikin (1794) are important early sources. Brown (1818) is the most extensive and most convincingly sourced biography of Howard. Field (1855) provides additional unpublished Howard correspondence that supports the adulatory biography of Field (1850). Southwood (1958) seems to me to be the best twentieth-century biography of Howard. Other twentieth-century biographical sources include DNB (2004), England (1973), Godber (1977) (which includes photos and engravings of Howard’s houses and cottages) and Howard (1958). Many short biographies of Howard are freely available on the Internet.