Beer, Thomas

BEER

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Date: 5/9/2006 at 06:12:36

Beer, Thomas (Nov. 22, 1889 - Apr. 18, 1940), novelist, short-story writer, and biographer, was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the first son and second of the three children of William Collins and Martha Ann Alice (Baldwin) Beer. He was named for his paternal grandfather, a lawyer and for many years a state judge in Ohio. The elder Thomas Beer, like his wife, Tabitha Dinsmore, was of Scottish and Scotch-Irish descent, their families having moved to Ohio from Pennsylvania early in the nineteenth century. Beer's grandfather on his mother's side, Linus Caleb Baldwin, who was of English descent, held ranch lands in Wyoming and elsewhere in the West but lived in Council Bluffs; he married Alice Boyle, a Presbyterian of Scottish and English stock. Beer's father studied law with a relative in Council Bluffs and joined the National Surety Company, for which he traveled widely in the West. While his three children were still very young, however, he was transferred to New York City, and the family moved to Yonkers, N. Y. Thomas, bookish and precocious, learned to read long before he started to school. After attending public grammar school, he went to the Mackenzie School at Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., where he wrote stories for the school magazine. He was graduated in 1911 from Yale (where he was a friend of the writer Waldo Frank) and entered the law school of Columbia University. Though he spent three years there and then worked for two years in his father's law office, he found the law uncongenial and abandoned it for writing.

Beer's first published story, "The Brothers" (called "The Doughnuts" in an original longer form), was printed in the Century magazine in 1917. Not long after its appearance he enlisted as a private in the army field artillery; in 1918 he went to France as first lieutenant on the staff of the 87th Division. On his return he devoted himself to writing, and it was in the years from 1921 to 1930 that the bulk of his work was done. His first novel, The Fair Rewards (1922), dealt with the New York stage and the conflict between the hero's artistic aspirations and the commercial necessities of the theatre. Next came a biography of Stephen Crane (1923), warmly praised by the critics and still highly regarded. Sandoval (1924), called by Ernest Boyd the best American novel of the season, dealt with New York in 1870. The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century (1926) ridiculed some of the great figures of the time yet looked back nostalgically. The style--oblique, witty, and condescending--has been described as too clever for its own good; certainly after thirty years it seemed sadly dated, although in its day The Mauve Decade was a best-seller. The Road to Heaven (1928), a novel that disappointed Beer's admirers, was followed by Hanna (1929), a study in the style of The Mauve Decade of Mark Hanna [q.v.], Republican boss of the 1890's. Beer derived some of his material from his father, who had known Hanna, and the book was on the whole sympathetic.

While he was working on sophisticated books that appealed to a limited public, Beer was also writing scores of short stories for the popular magazines, stories which he belittled, and with reason. A man who has established himself as a wit, a bon vivant, and a man of the world would naturally disguise his interest in the common people, the "boobs" that H. L. Mencken had made it so fashionable to despise. Perhaps Beer even concealed from himself his satisfaction in writing about small-town folk and honestly believed that he turned out potboilers merely for money to live well, entertain his friends, and enjoy good food and drink. Of a thoroughly urban type, he loved good conversation in pleasant company. But he was not only a brilliant and inspired talker; he was also an attentive listener, and it was to this second gift that he owed the material for his tales. His listening career began in Council Bluffs, where his grandmother told him countless stories, and continued throughout his life. He listened to strangers on trains and buses, in stores and restaurants, and held in his remarkable memory incidents that grew into tales of farm and country life, set in imaginary towns such as Zerbetta, Ohio, and Converis, N. Y. During his lifetime he allowed only one collection of his stories to be published, Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians (1933); and yet it is possible that his stories may last longer than his novels, proving that in one case, at least, the common man, impatiently awaiting another Beer story in his five-cent magazine, was a better critic than the bright set in which Beer himself moved.

Lewis Mumford described his appearance as bulky, almost clumsy, yet somehow delicate. "No one could forget the dancing mockery of his narrow eyes, when he unveiled them; his quick wince of affected agony, or the fixed stare of incredulousness with which he greeted a stupidity or a vulgarity." Beer never married. During his last years he suffered from mental and physical ill health and was unable to write. He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty in a New York City hotel, leaving an abandoned novel, The Country of the Young, a tale of family life during the Spanish-American War. A second collection of short stories, Mrs. Egg and Other Americans (1947), was published posthumously. He was buried in the family plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, N. Y.

source - Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2, To 1940. American Council of Learned Societies, 1944-1958.