Smith, Logan Pearsall

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.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.