The Fair Rewards

Thomas Beer (1889-1940) was an American biographer, novelist, essayist, satirist, and author of short fiction. Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, he graduated from Yale University in 1911 and went on to study law at Columbia. He practised law with his father from 1913-17 before serving in France during WWI. Whilst best known for his biographies of Stephen Crane (1923) and businessman and politician Mark Hanna (1929), and for his study of American manners in the 1890s, The Mauve Decade (1926), he also published three novels. These were The Fair Rewards (1922), Sandoval: A Romance of Bad Manners (1924), and The Road to Heaven: A Romance of Morals (1928). The Fair Rewards offers the reader an amusing insight into the American theatre between 1890-1920, giving a portrait of the actors and their world. In addition to his novels, around 140 of Beer's short stories appeared in The Saturday Evening Post between 1917-36, with a collection of his stories, Mrs Egg and Other Barbarians, published in book form in 1933. A further collection was published posthumously in 1947 under the title Mrs Egg and Other Americans: Collected Stories. An unconventional man who never married, Beer spent the winters in his old home in Yonkers and summers in a Victorian house at Nantucket. From July 1937 to September 1938 he suffered a physical and emotional breakdown and was never able to write again. He was found dead in bed at the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village on 18 April 1940 and whilst the official cause of death was recorded as a heart attack, his biographer John Clendenning claims Beer was a closeted homosexual and an alcoholic, suggesting that his death was a suicide.