Seven Men [Paperback]

InSeven Menthe brilliant English caricaturist and critic Max Beerbohm turns his comic searchlight upon the fantastic fin-de-siècle world of the 1890s—the age of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the young Yeats, as well of Beerbohm's own first success. In a series of luminous sketches, Beerbohm captures the likes of Enoch Soames, only begetter of the neglected poetic masterwork Fungoids; Maltby and Braxton, two fashionable novelists caught in a bitter rivalry; and "Savonarola" Brown, author of a truly incredible tragedy encompassing the entire Italian Renaissance. One of the masterpieces of modern humorous writing,Seven Menis also a shrewdly perceptive, heartfelt homage to the wonderfully eccentric character of a bygone age. As a parodist, he is probably the finest in English. —W.H. Auden


The most faultless of my contemporaries...I preferSeven Mento all his other books. —Bertrand Russell

Not even a good comedy is so rare as genuine satire, and when an example of the latter is produced some indulgence in superlatives may be excused. In the case of [Seven Men] it is difficult to restrain praise within the bounds of judgment, for its beneficent, limpid ridicule is an undiluted joy. —The SpectatorSir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm(1872-1956) was born in London and studied at Oxford. He published his first collection of essays, entitledThe Works of Max Beerbohm,in 1896 and soon established a reputation as a brilliant caricaturist and critic. He was married to the American actress Florence Kahn and lived in Rapallo, Italy, for most of his life.

John Updike(1932–2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In 1954 he began to publish inThe New Yorker, where he continued to contribute short stories, poems, and criticism until his death. His major work was the set of four novels chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit: Angstrom, hlÓ7