Max Beerbohm earned his fame as a caricaturist and essayist, and Zuleika Dobson is his only novel. Despite that, Zuleika has earned no small measure of fame, with the Modern Library ranking it 59th in its “100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century.” Beerbohm’s essays were famous for their sharp wit and humor, and Zuleika follows in that tradition—Beerbohm himself called the novel “the work of a leisurely essayist amusing himself with a narrative idea.”
