Ernest Boyd

Critic, writer, and translator Ernest Augustus Boyd (1887-1946) was born in Dublin, Ireland. While serving in Baltimore with the British consular service, Boyd formed a friendship with critic H. L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury. In 1920, after posts in several other countries, Boyd left the consular service and moved to New York to devote himself to his critical career. Known for his "caustic wit," he wrote articles and reviews for the American Mercury, the New York Evening Post, the Saturday Review of Literature, and in the 1930s served as an editor at the American Spectator alongside James Branch Cabell, Eugene O'Neill, and Theodore Dreiser. Boyd published over twenty books, including volumes on the Irish Literary Renaissance, biographies of H. L. Mencken (1925) and Guy de Maupassant (1926), and collections of his essays and criticism

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