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This young man is E. F. Benson, affectionately know as Fred. He is long dead now, and the sidebar picture is of him as an older man - but I would want to be remembered young - so why not him. Fred wrote prolifically. Over 100 books in non-fiction, "spook stories" (scary stories for the time), English Boarding School fiction and society fiction.
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His style, tone and ease of the English language brings warms my heart. Here is a 2 sentence description of 4 teachers playing whist from "Robin Linnet" (only since I happen to have it open still from Jury Duty)
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"It was curious to note now, immediately on the advent of the players to make up their table at whist, all these lesser problems and pronouncements with regard to the position of Wagner, Sargent and Debussy in the realms or art were immediately dismissed for the greater preoccupation. For those middle-aged men in spite of their gently-fossilized existence, their indulgent contempt for aything that was not immediately "Cambridge,"their general pessimism and gusto, in that they were genuinely fond of games, both the milder and more sedentary ones that they themselves played, and those better suited to the robust vigour of their pupils, accepting the importance of them as a clause in the creed that made Cambridge just precisely what it was."
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Doesn't that just say everything about them? He has a cadence that echos, although does not mimic, Shakespeare.
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If you have never read him, start with Mapp and Lucia!!!!
And this young man, this picture of dapperness, is a young Kurt Vonnegut. Of his greatness, little need be said.
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He was a many of wonderful works of fiction (start with Breakfast of Champions - his own 50th birthday present to himself). But if you want a treat, then read his collection of essays and notes from later life. No curmudgeon has ever been so wonderfully sharing. I shall quote a short piece from "A Man Without A Country"
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I am one of America's Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic, but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as thought I am swimming in chicken soup. Like me, many American socialists were freshwater people. Most Americans don't know what the socialists did during the first half of the past century with art, with eloquence, with organizing skills, to elevate the self-respect, the dignity and the political acumen of American wage earners, of our working class.
That wage earners, without social position or high education or wealth, are of inferior intellect is surely belied by the fact that two of the most splendid writers and speakers on the deepest subjects in American history were self-taught workment. I speak, of course, of Carl Sandberg the poet from Illinois, and Abraham Lincoln of Kentucky, then Indiana, and finally Illinois. Both, may I say, were continental, freshwater people like me. Hooray for our team!
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Go. Read them.