33 Facts About Frederick Crews

Frederick Campbell Crews was an American essayist and literary critic.

Frederick Crews received popular attention for The Pooh Perplex, a book of satirical essays parodying various schools of literary criticism.

Frederick Crews was a prominent participant in the "Freud wars" of the 1980s and 1990s, a debate over the reputation, scholarship, and impact on the 20th century of Freud, who founded psychoanalysis.

Frederick Crews published a variety of skeptical and rationalist essays, including book reviews and commentary for The New York Review of Books, on a variety of topics including Freud and recovered memory therapy, some of which were published in The Memory Wars.

Frederick Crews published successful handbooks for college writers, such as The Random House Handbook.

Frederick Crews was born in suburban Philadelphia on February 10,1933.

Frederick Crews lived in Berkeley with his wife, Elizabeth Frederick Crews, a photographer who was born and raised in Berkeley, California.

Frederick Crews died in Oakland, California on June 21,2024, at the age of 91.

Frederick Crews completed his undergraduate education at Yale University in 1955.

Frederick Crews received his PhD in literature from Princeton University in 1958.

Frederick Crews cited Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hawthorne, and Freud as major influences during his time at Princeton.

In 1958, Frederick Crews joined the UC Berkeley English Department, where he taught for 36 years before retiring as its chair in 1994.

Frederick Crews was an anti-war activist from 1965 to about 1970 and advocated draft resistance as co-chair of Berkeley's Faculty Peace Committee.

In 1963, Frederick Crews published his first bestseller The Pooh Perplex: A Student Casebook that satirized the type of casebooks then assigned to first-year university students in introductory literature and composition courses.

In 1970, Frederick Crews edited Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, a collection of essays by his students that analyzed a variety of authors from a psychoanalytic perspective; a review by Jose Barchilon credited the book with important accomplishments, including being "an achievement in the teaching and learning of psychoanalysis in a department of literature", which the reviewer noted was a "rare occurrence".

The collection included an essay, "Anaesthetic Criticism," in which Frederick Crews disparaged contemporary schools of literary criticism, especially that of Northrop Frye and his followers.

In 1986, Frederick Crews published The Critics Bear It Away, which was wholly devoted to literary criticism.

Frederick Crews's repeated message to literary critics is to be critical of their own interpretation when making statements about the meaning of a work.

Frederick Crews began his career using psychoanalytic literary criticism but gradually rejected this approach and psychoanalysis in general.

In 1977, Frederick Crews read the draft of a work by the philosopher Adolf Grunbaum that later became The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, and helped Grunbaum to obtain a publication offer from the University of California Press.

In 1996, Crews credited the psychiatrist Henri F Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious with beginning a twenty-five-year-long reevaluation of the position of psychoanalysis within the history of medicine, and acknowledged other book-length critical analyses of Freud and psychotherapy, including Frank Sulloway's Freud, Biologist of the Mind, Grunbaum's The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, and Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc.

Frederick Crews wrote the foreword to the revised 1997 edition of Freud Evaluated, suggesting that its republication "advanced the long debate over psychoanalysis to what may well be its decisive moment".

In 1985, Frederick Crews reviewed The Foundations of Psychoanalysis in The New Republic.

Frederick Crews went on to criticize Freud and psychoanalysis extensively, becoming a major figure in the discussions and criticisms of Freud that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s.

Frederick Crews was one of almost fifty signatories of a petition submitted by Freud historian Peter Swales to the Library of Congress requesting that a Freud exhibition the Library had planned be rendered less one-sided; the protests evidently delayed the exhibit's opening by two years.

In 1993 and 1994, Frederick Crews wrote a series of critical essays and reviews of books relating to repressed and recovered memories, which provoked heated debate and letters to the editors of The New York Review of Books.

Frederick Crews believes the "memories" of childhood seduction Freud reported were not real memories but constructs that Freud created and forced upon his patients.

In 1974, Frederick Crews published The Random House Handbook, a best-selling college composition textbook that offered extensive rhetorical advice for writing academic essays as well as reference information on correct and effective use of the English language.

Frederick Crews co-authored three editions of The Borzoi Handbook for Writers for McGraw-Hill.

Frederick Crews wrote articles such as "A Shower of Lies and the Mess at Penn State" and "The Sandusky Case is Exactly opposite to What the Public Believes: The Case Against Jerry Sandusky Revisited".

Frederick Crews was motivated to defend Sandusky after reading The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment by Mark Pendergrast.

Frederick Crews expanded on his thoughts in the case in an interview with John Ziegler on the World According to Zig podcast in October 2019.

Frederick Crews served on the editorial board of Cybereditions, a print on demand publishing company founded by Denis Dutton in 2000.