Holbrook Jackson Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Holbrook Jackson

Holbrook Jackson is known today mainly as a bibliophile and as the author of the agreeably written but also careful and well-balanced study The Eighteen Nineties (1913), a book that was the first and remains the best interpretive survey of the period's arts and letters. And Jackson's other essays, taken as a whole, are among the best of their era. They were well received when they appeared, but they never reached the wide public whose idols among essayists were men of thinner but more genteel and more optimistic stamp, such as E. V. Lucas and A. C. Benson. It may not overstate the case to say that Jackson is among the most rewarding of the many early-twentieth-century essayists whose work stands largely neglected at present. His essays, almost always clear and economical, range from the familiar to the expository and argumentative; sometimes they are as much narrative as essayistic; the subjects are diverse and seldom trivial; and the point of view is often quietly but intriguingly unconventional.

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