Logan Pearsall Smith (Lloyd Logan Pearsall Smith) Biography

American essayist, born in Millville, New Jersey, educated at Harvard and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he set the stories in his first book, Youth of Parnassus (1895). With his sister Mary and Bernard Berenson, whom she later married, he produced a periodical entitled The Golden Urn in 1897–8, contributing short prose sketches of a wittily aphoristic character. These formed the beginnings of his Trivia (1902, revised edition 1918) which was collected with More Trivia (1922), Afterthoughts (1931), and Last Words (1933) as All Trivia in 1933. The English Language (1912), a treatise on usage displaying his elegantly mannered style, was among the works that drew him into association with Robert Bridges for the formation of the Society for Pure English in 1913. His numerous critical works include The Prospects of Literature (1927) and Milton and His Modern Critics (1940), in which he was hostile to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound for their denigration of Milton. The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton (1907) remains a standard work on that author. Unforgotten Years (1938) is autobiographical. Robert Gathorne-Hardy's Recollections of Pearsall Smith appeared in 1949.