Thomas Beer Collection

Thomas Beer was an author of short stories, novels, and non-fiction prose. Beer was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on November 22, 1889, and raised in Yonkers, New York. He attended Yale University from which he graduated in 1911. Beer enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in France at the end of World War I. Between 1917 and 1936 Beer published a number of short stories in The Saturday Evening Post, and while his short stories provided him with financial security, Beer was more interested in his other writing projects. Beer's novels include The Fair Rewards (1922), Sandoval (1924), and The Road to Heaven (1928). Beer is also known for his non-fiction writings such as The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century (1926), Hanna (1929), which is a biography of Mark Hanna, and Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (1923). While on the surface Beer appeared successful, his personal life and writing career were troubled. While Stephen Crane was a critical success and was lauded as an important resource about Stephen Crane when it was initially published, it is now believed that Beer based the biography on forgeries of his own devising and portrayed a number of fictional events and people. In 1938 Beer suffered a nervous breakdown for which he was briefly institutionalized, and on April 18, 1940, died of a heart attack (although it's believed his death may have been a suicide) in New York.