Max Beerbohm Books in Order

One of Beerbohm's earliest and best-known essays, this mock defense of rouge and makeup cheerfully overturns moral seriousness. It is a small manifesto of style, performance, and the pleasure of not sounding earnest.

Beerbohm's first book of caricatures introduces the gift that made him famous as an artist. Writers and public figures from the 1890s appear in quick, exact portraits that are mocking, elegant, and surprisingly alive.

A disreputable dandy hides behind a saintly mask to win the innocent Jenny Mere. Beerbohm turns the conceit into a sly fairy tale about appearance, desire, and whether pretending can change a person's life.

This collection places Beerbohm's best-known fairy tale beside other short pieces that show his range. The mood shifts from playful fantasy to social satire, but the light touch and exact phrasing never disappear.

A lively essay collection in which Beerbohm turns ordinary subjects, farewells, trains, elections, manners, even fire, into polished comedy. The pleasure is in the voice: amused, exact, and always a little sideways.

A set of political cartoons in which John Bull, and Britain with him, appears childish, touchy, and off balance. Prompted by the Boer War era, these drawings show a sharper and more openly political Beerbohm than usual.

When the dazzling Zuleika arrives in Oxford, the university's undergraduates fall helplessly in love with her. Beerbohm turns that absurd premise into a dark, glittering satire about vanity, privilege, and the foolishness of mass devotion.

Seventeen Christmas-themed prose parodies let Beerbohm mimic the voices of major writers from his own time. The fun is not just in the imitation, but in how exactly he catches each author's habits of mind.

This book gathers fifty caricatures of politicians, writers, actors, and artists from the early twentieth century. Beerbohm reduces each sitter to a few telling lines, then somehow makes the whole personality snap into view.

Enoch Soames is a failed poet who cannot stop dreaming of future fame. In desperation he makes a bargain with the Devil, and Beerbohm turns literary vanity into one of the strangest and smartest stories of the period.

A quiet seaside acquaintance slowly reveals a chilling story about palmistry, fear, and a railway disaster. Beerbohm keeps the tone calm and conversational, which only makes the uncertainty, and the unease, grow stronger.

Beerbohm meets a gambler in Dieppe and finds himself fascinated by the man's charm, nerve, and hunger for risk. The result is a finely judged portrait of thrill-seeking that is admiring, skeptical, and quietly ominous.

This strange, elegant collection presents a gallery of half-real, half-invented men from the 1890s. Beerbohm blends memoir, social comedy, and fantasy, with unforgettable pieces like Enoch Soames, A. V. Laider, and James Pethel.

Part memoir and part theatrical portrait, this book looks at the great actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree through Max's affectionate but unsentimental eye. It captures both the man and the world of the Edwardian stage around him.

A book of fifty-two caricatures and humorous illustrations, many shaped by the atmosphere of the First World War years. Beerbohm ranges across public life, catching celebrities and statesmen in poses that gently undo them.

A later essay collection, quieter and more reflective than Beerbohm's early work but just as sharp. He writes about memory, habits, travel, writing, and small embarrassments with wit that never feels forced.

A sequence of caricatures devoted to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite world around him. Beerbohm is playful rather than cruel, turning a dense artistic circle into a witty visual comedy of manners and poses.

This caricature collection looks both backward and outward, mixing contemporary figures with affectionate returns to earlier decades. It shows Beerbohm as a comic historian, interested as much in atmosphere as in likeness.

This volume gathers fifty-one caricatures, each built from Beerbohm's gift for finding the one line or posture that says everything. Writers, politicians, and public figures appear both recognizable and gently absurd.

Beerbohm turns Venice into something more than a postcard view. This short essay is graceful, funny, and slightly wary, looking at beauty, performance, and the odd position of the outsider in a city built for display.

A late collection that does exactly what the title promises. Essays, sketches, and stories sit side by side, showing Beerbohm moving easily from social comedy to memory, travel, and whimsical fantasy.

In a prehistoric version of London, a dragon wakes on Hay Hill and throws a settled little world into panic. Beerbohm plays the fantasy straight enough to make the satire, and the bravery, land all the harder.

A slim portfolio of caricatures based on Noel Coward's operetta Bitter Sweet. Beerbohm turns the production's stars and theatrical glamour into bright, stylish images that are affectionate, pointed, and unmistakably his.

A brief but vivid portrait of Lytton Strachey, one brilliant observer writing about another. Beerbohm focuses on Strachey's mind, style, and curious force as a historian and literary personality.

Here Beerbohm turns his eye on poets across different centuries, from the canonical to the modern. The drawings are literary jokes, but also compact acts of criticism, each one saying something about how the writer reads.

Built around Beerbohm's BBC talks, this late collection is full of memory, charm, and dry observation. Old London, music halls, cars, manners, and literary afterthoughts all pass through the same calm comic intelligence.

This expanded version of Seven Men adds further portraits to Beerbohm's odd company of remembered and invented figures. It keeps the same blend of memoir, fantasy, and literary mischief that makes the original so distinctive.

Beerbohm's theatre criticism is less about handing down verdicts than about catching the mood of a performance and the absurdities around it. Actors, audiences, and playwrights all come in for his crisp, amused scrutiny.

This volume recovers Beerbohm's drawings from 1892 to 1899, including many first seen in magazines. It offers a sharp picture of his early style, and of the artistic and literary world he was already skewering.

A compact way into Beerbohm's best nonfiction, this selection samples the essays that made his reputation. Taste, memory, theatre, reading, manners, and self-mockery all appear, shaped by his unusually controlled comic voice.

These letters to Beerbohm's close friend Reginald Turner show him at his freest and funniest. They bring the literary and social life of the 1890s and after into view, without losing the private warmth of real friendship.

This collection continues Beerbohm's run as one of the keenest theatre critics of his day. He writes about plays, performers, and theatrical fashions with exact taste, comic timing, and a healthy dislike of puffed-up nonsense.

The last stretch of Beerbohm's theatre criticism before he left England for Italy. These pieces keep his usual balance of close observation, dry wit, and sharp feeling for how actors and audiences shape an evening.

A substantial one-volume selection that brings together the prose most readers come to Beerbohm for. Essays, stories, parodies, and memoir pieces sit side by side, giving a broad view of his quiet but exact comic art.

This sly early satire imagines Oscar Wilde not as a blazing celebrity, but as a faded, elderly figure already turning into history. The joke is sharp, and so is Beerbohm's eye for pose and reputation.

Centered on the friendship between Max Beerbohm and painter William Rothenstein, this volume gathers letters and context across decades. It offers a close view of artistic friendship, gossip, loyalty, and literary life from within.

This collection brings together Beerbohm's caricatures of writers from a wide literary span, from the classical past to modern figures. It shows how well he could turn criticism into drawing without losing the joke.

A critical study of Beerbohm's life, persona, and art, with special attention to the line between performance and sincerity. It is useful for readers curious about how carefully Max fashioned both the man and the author.

A wide-ranging selection of Beerbohm's correspondence across more than sixty years. The letters show the same intelligence and comic poise as the essays, while also revealing his friendships, routines, and long view of literary life.

This volume gathers Beerbohm's poems, light verse, and parodies, including much that was not previously easy to find. It reveals a writer who brought the same precision and mischief to verse that he brought to prose.

A gathering of youthful Beerbohm, full of early essays, sketches, and parodic play. It lets you watch the tone arrive almost fully formed: amused, polished, slightly insolent, and already very sure of its own rhythm.

This modern selection presents Beerbohm's essays as a living body of work, not a dusty curiosity. It is an excellent entry point, bringing together pieces on taste, literature, society, memory, and the comedy of self-presentation.

Beerbohm's first essay collection announced him at once as a stylist and satirist. Written in the 1890s, these pieces skewer dandies, royalty, cosmetics, and literary pretension with mock scholarship and effortless poise.