Beer, Thomas, 1889-1940, American author, b. Council Bluffs, Iowa, grad. Yale, 1911, and studied law at Columbia, 1911-13. He is best remembered for his biographies of Stephen Crane (1923) and Marcus (Mark) Hanna (1929) and his witty study of American manners in the 1890s, The Mauve Decade (1926). Some of his realistic short stories were collected by Wilson Follett in Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians (1947).