Thomas Beer (November 22, 1889 – April 18, 1940) was an American biographer, novelist, essayist, satirist, and author of short fiction.
Beer was best known for his biographies of Stephen Crane (1923) and Mark Hanna (1929), as well as his study of American manners during the 1890s, The Mauve Decade (1926).
After Beer's death of a heart attack in his apartment in the Hotel Albert in New York, another collection of his short stories, edited by Wilson Follett, was published as Mrs.
According to archivist Robert Nedelkoff, In the 1950s, during his first lectures at the University of Virginia, Faulkner mentioned that in the days when he read the Saturday Evening Post at his Oxford postmaster's job instead of delivering the magazine, he had admired Thomas Beer's ... stories and had learned something of characterization and plot from them.
In 2014 three scholars, including two historians and a forensic linguist, determined that Beer had almost certainly also created documents cited in his biography of Mark Hanna.
John Clendenning, the biographer of Josiah Royce, is cited in an article in the Des Moines, Iowa Register as having identified Beer as a closeted homosexual and an alcoholic and suggesting that his death was a suicide.