19 Facts About Claude Fredericks

Claude Fredericks was an American poet, playwright, printer, writer, and teacher.

Claude Fredericks was a professor of literature at Bennington College in Vermont for more than 30 years, from 1961 to 1992.

Claude Fredericks was born in Springfield, Missouri, on October 14,1923.

Claude Fredericks's mother took him to weekly Sunday afternoon picture shows and he listened to broadcasts of plays and symphony concerts on the radio.

Claude Fredericks took him on trips to New York, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Europe in the 1930s.

Claude Fredericks left college after a year and a half.

Claude Fredericks continued to maintain his journal and wrote stories and poems.

Claude Fredericks decided that printing books by hand would allow him to make a living without worrying about having his own writings published.

Claude Fredericks printed books and broadsides that are in themselves small works of art, often stunning in their simplicity and elegance.

Claude Fredericks printed books off and on for close to fifty years, and today they are much sought after by those who love fine printing, collectors, and dealers in rare books.

Many university libraries and public libraries, including the Rare Book Room of The New York Public Library, have extensive collections of the large output that Claude Fredericks produced over his 50 years as a printer.

In 1961 Claude Fredericks began to teach at Bennington College, famous for the non-traditional, even radical, liberal-arts education it offered its students.

Claude Fredericks could read many of the works he taught in their original languages: Latin, Greek, and Japanese.

Claude Fredericks taught students in tutorials usually held in his second-floor corner office in Commons Building at Bennington.

Claude Fredericks began keeping a journal in 1932 when he was eight years old and wrote for more than eighty years, with his last entries dated a week before his death; it fills some 65,000 pages.

Claude Fredericks, who had written thousands of poems, published a small collection of 141 of them in Selected Poems in 2005, drawing on his journals where he had recorded his drafts and revisions.

Claude Fredericks had a romantic relationship in the early 1950s with James Merrill and they remained lifelong friends.

The last 15,000 pages of The Journal of Claude Fredericks is a detailed depiction of their intimate life together.

Claude Fredericks died at home in Pawlet, Vermont, on January 11,2013.