Max Beerbohm: the prince of minor writers.
Essays and criticism on Max Beerbohm - Critical Essays. Max Beerbohm is both a product and a critic of the late nineteenth century aesthetic movement.From his precocious debut as a dandy in 1890s Oxford until he put his pen aside in the aftermath of World War II, Beerbohm was recognized as an incomparable observer of modern life and an essayist whose voice was always and only his own. Here Phillip Lopate, one of the finest essayists of our day.Max Beerbohm was born in London in 1872; studied at Charterhouse School and Merton College, Oxford; and was a brilliant figure in the Savoy and Yellow Book circles by the time he was twenty-four. His genius is that of the essay in its purest distillation: a clear cross-section of life as seen through the lens of self; the pure culture (in the biological sense) of observing personality.
The essayist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm was one of the great figures of the late Victorian and Edwardian era in London—and then had a surprising Indian summer in America in the early nineteen.Beerbohm had published no fewer than eleven prose works and volumes of caricatures by 1919, the year in which he immortalised Enoch Soames. But during the course of a long life he was to produce little else and—crucially—was never a poet.
MAX BEERBOHM (1872-1956) The question of how to place Max Beerbohm historically must have caused as much confusion for Beerbohm himself as it has for critics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Though he lived until 1956, his assertion in 1896 that he belonged to “the Beardsley period” seemed to hold true until his death.
