Egan, Beresford
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1905-1984) UK artist, illustrator and author, in South Africa from 1910 to 1926, who early established a reputation for sexually charged and otherwise transgressive illustrations for works like the 1928 translation of Pierre Louÿs's Aphrodite (1896); he also did covers for Aleister Crowley's Moonchild (1929) and Sean M'Guire's Lost Race novel Beast or Man? (1930): as in Crowley's case, his later career long outlived the time when Decadence could fairly be seen as response to the brutalities of late nineteenth-century philistinism, though his first novel, Pollen: A Novel in Black and White (1933), explores the boundaries of the then permissible as its "deco-decadent" protagonist experiences supernatural ecstasies in Paris. Of more direct sf interest is Epilogue (coll 1946), a series of sketches of imagined post-World War Two life, including one, "A Trip to the Moon", in which Space Flight to the Moon is presented archaically. [JC]
Patrick Beresford Egan
born London: 9 July 1905
died London: 7 January 1984
works
- Pollen: A Novel in Black and White (London: Denis Archer, 1933) [illus/Beresford Egan: hb/nonpictorial]
- Epilogue (London: Fortune Press, 1946) [coll: hb/nonpictorial]
about the author
- Adrian Woodhouse. Beresford Egan (Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2005) [nonfiction: graph: illus/hb/Beresford Egan]
links
previous versions of this entry