The Fair Rewards [A Whisky Priest Book]

"In the 1950s, during his first lectures at the University of Virginia, Faulkner mentioned that in the days when he read the Saturday Evening Post at his Oxford postmaster's job instead of delivering the magazine, he had admired Thomas Beer's (1889-1940) stories and had learned something of characterization and plot from them. He asked if any of the students had read Beer; there was silence. He asked if any had heard of him. One student had heard of Beer's biography of Stephen Crane and of his bestseller of '26, The Mauve Decade. Others who've admired Beer's work include Lewis Mumford, historian Frank Friedel and Carl Van Vechten (with whom Beer had some aspects of style and sensibility in common). The Fair Rewards is a portrait in novel form of the American theater from 1890 to 1920, and well illustrates Beer's gift for delineating pre-World War I America in a somewhat melancholy, elliptical fashion." -- Robert Nedelkoff, The Neglected Books Page