Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (1872-1956) was born in London and studied at Oxford. He published his first collection of essays, entitled The Works of Max Beerbohm, in 1896 and soon established a reputation as a brilliant caricaturist and critic. He was married to the American actress Florence Kahn and lived in Rapallo, Italy, for most of his life. <p/>John Updike (1932-2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In 1954 he began to publish in The New Yorker, where he continued to contribute short stories, poems, and criticism until his death. His major work was the set of four novels chronicling the life of Harry "Rabbit: Angstrom, he two of which, Rabbit is Richand Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His last books were the novel The Widows of Eastwick and Due Considerations, a collection of his essays and criticism.
