Joseph Warren Beach
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Joseph Warren Beach (14 January 1880 - 13 August 1957) was an American poet, critic and literary scholar.
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[edit] Life
Beach had been drawn to the University of Minnesota from Gloversville, New York, by the school's president, his uncle, Cyrus Northrop. For teachers there, "he wrote his first poetry and his brilliant undergraduate papers," wrote University of Minnesota historian James Gray[1].
Following Beach's graduation in 1900 he became an instructor in rhetoric. Then for many years he moved back and forth between Minnesota and Harvard, alternating between periods of teaching and periods of working for M.A. and Ph.D. degrees.
After taking his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, Beach returned to Minneapolis in 1907 to the Department of English at the University of Minnesota. Starting as Assistant Professor, he became Associate Professor in 1917 and Professor in 1924. Beach chaired the English Department from 1939 to 1948, after which time he retired.
[edit] Works
He is the author of American Fiction 1920—1940 and The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in Technique. He was an expert on many literary figures: Henry James (The Method of Henry James (1918)), George Meredith, Thomas Hardy; and nineteenth-century literature in general - Beach had a special love for poetry. His The Making of the Auden Canon (1957) was a study of how W. H. Auden revised his earlier-published poems as his view of the world changed. He wrote also The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (1936).
Beach also brought out two volumes of his own poetry, Sonnets of the Head and Heart (1903) and Involuntary Witness (1950). His letters and papers are in the Library of Congress.
[edit] Family
By his first wife, Elisabeth Northrop (1871-1917, m. 1907), he had two sons, Northrop and Warren. His second wife was Dagmar Doneghy, who married him in 1918.
[edit] References
- Life in The National Cyclopædia of American Biography (47 , 1965: 596-97)
- William Van O'Connor (editor), Forms of Modern Fiction: Essays Collected in Honor of Joseph Warren Beach (1959)
