Biography
After taking his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, Joseph Warren Beach returned to Minneapolis in 1907 to the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, his undergraduate alma mater. Starting as Assistant Professor, he became Associate Professor in 1917 and Professor in 1924. Beach chaired the English Department from 1939 to 1948, after which time he retired. An expert in many literary figures -- Henry James, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and nineteenth-century literature in general -- Beach had a special love for poetry. His The Making of the Auden Canon (1957) was a masterful study of how Auden revised his earlier-published poems as his view of the world changed. Beach also brought out two volumes of his own poetry, Sonnets of the Head and Heart (1903) and Involuntary Witness (1950). By his first wife, Elisabeth Northrop (1871-1917, m. 1907), he had two sons, Northrop (1912-) and Warren (1914-). His second wife was Dagmar Doneghy, who married him in 1918. His brief life in The National Cyclopædia of American Biography, 47 (1965): 596-97, tells us that outdoor camping was an important part of his life. His letters and papers are in the Library of Congress.
