Karl E. Beckson papers, 1956-1993, bulk 1965-1992

Karl Beckson was a professor of English literature and author of many articles and books on British literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He was born Emmanuel Beckson on February 4, 1926, and raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. After serving in the United States Navy during the Second World War, he earned a B.A. (1949) in English from the University of Arizona and an M.A. (1952) and Ph.D. (1959) from Columbia University, where he studied with Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. He worked briefly at Columbia, Bronx Community College, and Fairleigh-Dickinson University before teaching at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, for the rest of his career. As a scholar, he took special interest in the late-nineteenth-century Symbolist movement and its influence on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers such as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and George Bernard Shaw. He wrote several books on Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, and Henry Harland, including biographies of Symons and Harland. He also co-wrote a dictionary of literary terms and edited several volumes of letters and memoirs. Beckson retired in 2004 and died on April 29, 2008.