Beerbohm, Max

Beerbohm, Max ( Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm) (1872–1956), critic, essayist, and caricaturist. His one completed novel, Zuleika Dobson (1911), is a fantasized distillation of the Oxford atmosphere of the 1890s. His writing, like his personality, was characterized by elegance and by a light but incisive touch in applying irony and wit to society's foibles and to the idiosyncracies of writers, artists, and politicians. His first published book and collection of essays in this vein was The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896), followed by More (1899), Yet Again (1909), And Even Now (1920). A Christmas Garland (1912) expertly parodied the literary styles of H. James, Wells, Kipling, and other leading contemporary writers. His best short stories were collected in Seven Men (1919). As an associate in the 1890s of Wilde and Beardsley, the Rhymers Club, etc., he was well placed to comment upon avant-garde tendencies of the period. As half-brother of the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Max had an entrée into theatrical circles and was a brilliant dramatic critic of the Saturday Review from 1898 to 1910; he succeeded G. B. Shaw, whose valedictory essay in that journal dubbed him ‘the incomparable Max’. His dramatic criticism is collected in Around Theatres (1953) and More Theatres (1968). His caricatures were as elegant and as individual as his literary works. Among the best-known collections of these are Caricatures of Twenty-Five Gentlemen (1896), The Poets' Corner (1904), and Rossetti and His Circle (1922). In the 1930s he began a new career as broadcaster; his commentaries on England are collected in Mainly on the Air (1957).