Thomas Beer

Thomas Beer 1889-1940, American author, b. Council Bluffs, Iowa, grad. Yale, 1911, and studied law at Columbia, 1911-13. He is best remembered for his biographies of Stephen Crane (1923) and Marcus (Mark) Hanna (1929) and his witty study of American manners in the 1890s, The Mauve Decade (1926). Some of his realistic short stories were collected by Wilson Follett in Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians (1947).

Beer, Thomas (1889–1940), born in Iowa, graduated from Yale (1911), and devoted himself to writing following his service in World War I. In addition to three novels—The Fair Rewards (1922), a story of the New York stage, whose central figure is an impresario constantly divided between his artistic convictions and the commercial aspects of his work; Sandoval (1924), “a romance of bad manners” depicting New York in 1870; and The Road to Heaven (1928), a sophisticated romance praising the virtues of rural living _he wrote such humorous short stories as those collected in Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians (1933). His biography of Stephen Crane (1923) did much to establish Crane's fame. The Mauve Decade (1926) is an interpretation of American life during the last part of the 19th century, and Hanna (1929) is a similar study centered on Mark Hanna. Both are written in an oblique and urbanely ironic style. The Agreeable Finish (1941) is a collection of short stories.