Edmund Gosse 
Father and Son 

Edmund Gosse was an English author and literary critic.  Gosse also found fame as a translator of Henrik Ibsen’s plays and he helped encourage the careers of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats.










Gosse’s most famous work is Father and Son, a biography he published in 1907.  The book describes Gosse’s early years after the death of his mother when his father took them to live in Devon.  Gosse discusses how his strict and religious father rejected some of the new evolutionary theories of his day and how Gosse himself came to reject his father’s religious beliefs. Father and Son is notable for being the first psychological biography ever written.