Logan Pearsall Smith

Lloyd Logan Pearsall Smith (18 October 1865 – 2 March 1946) was an American-born British essayist and critic. Harvard and Oxford educated, he was known for his aphorisms and epigrams, and was an expert on 17th century divines. His Words and Idioms made him an authority on correct English language usage. He wrote his autobiography, Unforgotten Years, in 1938.

Early life

Smith was born in Millville, New Jersey. He was the son of the prominent Quakers Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, and a descendant of James Logan, who was William Penn's secretary and the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania in the 18th century. His mother's family had become wealthy from its glass factories. He lived for a time as a boy in England.

Education Smith attended the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, Haverford College, Harvard College, and the University of Berlin. Smith later studied Greats at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1891.

title = Authorial Vanity Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast. — Logan Pearsall Smith As well as his employees listed, his followers included Desmond MacCarthy, John Russell, R. C. Trevelyan, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. He was, in part, the basis for the character of Nick Greene (Sir Nicholas Greene) in Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

Personal life

He settled in England after Oxford with occasional forays to continental Europe and became a British subject in 1913. He divided his time between Chelsea, where he was a close friend of Desmond MacCarthy and Rose Macaulay, and a Tudor farmhouse at Warsash near the Solent, called Big Chilling. Kenneth Clark further wrote "His tall frame, hunched up, with head thrust forward like a bird, was balanced unsteadily on vestigial legs".

Politically he was a socialist, having been converted by Graham Wallas, a founder of the Fabian Society.

His portrait, made in 1932 by Ethel Sands, is at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Works

1895. The Youth of Parnassus, and other stories 1902. Trivia 1907. The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton. Biography 1909. Songs and Sonnets 1912. The English Language 1919. A Treasury of English Prose 1920. Little Essays Drawn From The Writings Of George Santayana 1920 (ed.). Donne's Sermons: Selected Passages with an Essay 1920. Stories from the Old Testament retold. Hogarth Press 1921. More Trivia 1923. English Idioms 1925. Words and Idioms 1927. The Prospects of Literature. Hogarth Press 1930 (ed.) The Golden Grove: Selected Passages From The Sermons and Writings of Jeremy Taylor 1931. Afterthoughts 1933. All Trivia. Collection 1933. Last Words 1933. On Reading Shakespeare 1936. Fine Writing 1936. Reperusals & Recollections 1938. Unforgotten Years 1938. Death in Iceland. Privately printed in Reading with Iceland: A Poem by Robert Gathorne-Hardy. 1940. 1943. A Treasury Of English Aphorisms 1949 (ed.). A Religious Rebel: The Letters of "H.W.S." (Mrs. Pearsall Smith). Published in the USA as Philadelphia Quaker, The Letters of Hannah Whitall Smith 1949. (ed.). The Golden Shakespeare 1972. Four Words. Romantic, Originality, Creative, Genius 1982. Saved from the Salvage. With a Memoir of the Author by Cyril Connolly 1989. (Edward Burman, ed.) Logan Pearsall Smith. Anthology.