Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm

Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm

In 1907, Indiana passed the world's first involuntary sterilization law based on the theory of eugenics. In time, more than 30 states and a dozen foreign countries followed suit. Although the Indiana statute was later declared unconstitutional, other laws restricting immigration and regulating marriage on eugenic grounds were still in effect in the U.S. as late as the 1970s. A Century of Eugenics in America assesses the history of eugenics in the United States and its status in the age of the Human Genome Project. The essays explore the early support of compulsory sterilization by doctors and legislators; the implementation of eugenic schemes in Indiana, Georgia, California, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Alabama; the legal and social challenges to sterilization; and the prospects for a eugenics movement basing its claims on modern genetic science.

Sir Henry Maximilian Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) was the youngest of nine children born in London to well-to-do Lithuanian immigrants. As a boy he showed no propensity for writing or artwork, but despite the lack of formal training, upon entering Merton College, Oxford, he quickly became known for his essays and caricatures (and for being a dandy). When The Strand Magazine published thirty-six of his drawings in 1892, his career took off, and he left school without a degree. (Oxford would later give him an honorary degree.) He went to America briefly, to write press releases for his brother's theatrical company, then returned to England and wrote essays and drew caricatures for his friend Aubrey Beardsley's The Yellow Book magazine, among other publications. Some of his work around this time concerned the trial of Oscar Wilde, whom he'd befriended while a student. The trial, particularly Wilde's defense of the love that dare not speak its name, moved him greatly. In 1896, he published his first book, a collection of his essays called The Works of Max Beerbohm, and the first of many collections of his caricatures, Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen. Two years later he succeeded George Bernard Shaw as drama critic for the Saturday Review, a position he retained until 1910, when he married American actress Florence Kahn (Evelyn Waugh speculated it was a mariage blanc), and moved to a house overlooking the Mediterranean in Rapallo, Italy. Despite Florence's death, in 1951, and despite becoming popular in England as a BBC commentator, Beerbohm would remain in Italy until his own death, decades later at age eighty-three, just after marrying his former secretary and companion, Elisabeth Jungmann.

Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St. Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics and Jane Eyre: A Reader's Guide 
to Criticism.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780300033892
ISBN 10	0300033893
Title	Zuleika Dobson
Author	Max Beerbohm
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Yale University Press
Year published	1985-03-11
Number of pages	416
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.