Smith, Logan Pearsall

Smith, Logan Pearsall, 1865–1946, Anglo-American author, b. Millville, N.J. After 1888 he lived in England, studied at Oxford, and became a man of letters. His brief and exquisite essays were collected as All Trivia (1933). Other works include writings on the English language, a biography of Sir Henry Wotton (1907), On Reading Shakespeare (1933), Reperusals and Re-collections (1936), and Milton and His Modern Critics (1940).

Bibliography

See his autobiography, Unforgotten Years (1939).

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Smith, (Lloyd) Logan Pearsall (1865–1946) writer; born in Millvale, N.J. Member of a wealthy Quaker family, he studied at Haverford College (1881–84) and Harvard (1884–85), but took little interest in his family's glass-making business and went off to England in 1888 to pursue his literary interests at Oxford. Financially independent, he was able to devote his life to cultivating his aesthetic ideals, but although he published some fiction (The Youth of Parnassus, 1895), he was essentially an appreciator. Most of his published works were essays as in Trivia (1902), Reperusals and Re-Collection (1936), and Last Words (1945). He also became known as an editor and anthologist, and as a defender of the traditional English language and literary values, he published Milton and His Modern Critics (1940), an attack on his fellow Americans, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He spent most of his life in London, becoming a British citizen in 1913, and was a friend of many notable contemporaries—Whistler, Santayana, Henry James, and Berenson—who married Pearsall's sister Mary; another sister, Alys, was Bertrand Russell's first wife. His autobiography, Unforgotten Years (1938), was among his most engaging works.