Frederick Crews

In the book, Crews discussed three late novels by Henry James: The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904), analyzing how, in those novels, adherence to social conventions serves to keep hidden relationships from coming to light.

Frederick Campbell Crews (born February 20, 1933) is an American essayist and literary critic.

Crews was born in suburban Philadelphia in 1933.

Both his parents were avid readers and were tremendously influential in his life, said Crews: "They had both been raised in considerable poverty, and books had been extremely important to them personally, in shaping them. My mother was very literary; my father was very scientific. I feel that I got a little something of both sides."

In high school, Crews was co-captain of the tennis team, and for decades he remained an avid skier, hiker, swimmer, and runner.

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

They have two daughters and four grandchildren.

Crews completed his undergraduate education at Yale University in 1955.

Though his degree was in English, Crews entered the Directed Studies program during his first two years at Yale, which he describes as his greatest experience because the program was taught by a coordinated faculty and required students to distribute their courses among sciences, social sciences, literature, and philosophy.

Professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, Crews is the author of numerous books, including The Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the Later Novels of Henry James (1957), E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (1962), and The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (1966), a discussion of the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Crews's first book, The Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the Later Novels of Henry James (1957), was based on a prize-winning essay written by Crews while an undergraduate student at Yale University, initially published as part of a series.

He received his Ph.D in Literature from Princeton University in 1958.

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

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

Though he shared the widespread assumption during the mid-1960s that psychoanalytic theory was a valid account of human motivation and was one of the first academics to apply that theory systematically to the study of literature, Crews gradually came to regard psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.

This convinced him that his loyalty should not belong to any theory but rather to empirical standards and the skeptical point of view.

Throughout his career, Crews has brought his concern for rational discourse to the study of various issues, from the controversy over recovered memory, the credibility of the Rorschach test, and belief in alien abductions to Theosophy and "intelligent design."

He has also advocated for clear writing based on standards of sound argument and rhetorical effectiveness rather than adherence to rigid school-book rules.

"What interests me is general rationality," said Crews in an interview: "General rationality requires us to observe the world carefully, to consider alternative hypotheses to our own hypotheses, to gather evidence in a responsible way, to answer objections. These are habits of mind that science shares with good history, good sociology, good political science, good economics, what have you. And I summarize all this in what I call the 'empirical attitude.' It's a combination of feeling responsible to the evidence that is available, feeling responsible to go out and find that evidence, including the evidence that is contrary to one's presumptions, and responsibility to be logical with one's self and others. And this is an ideal that is not so much individual as social. The rational attitude doesn't really work when simply applied to one's self. It is something that we owe to each other.''"

In 1962, Crews's doctoral dissertation from Princeton University was published as E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism.

He received popular attention for The Pooh Perplex (1963), a book of satirical essays parodying contemporary casebooks.

Initially a proponent of psychoanalytic literary criticism, Crews later rejected psychoanalysis, becoming a critic of Sigmund Freud and his scientific and ethical standards.

In 1963, 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.

The book featured a fictitious set of English professors writing essays on A. A. Milne's classic character Winnie-the-Pooh, parodying Marxist, Freudian, Christian, Leavisite and Fiedlerian approaches to analyzing literary texts.

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 1966, he published a study of Hawthorne, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes, in which he examined Hawthorne's entire literary career including unfinished novels; it was re-issued in 1989 with Crews's reassessment of his initial position and an analysis of how literary criticism has dealt with Hawthorne since 1966.

In The Patch Commission (1968), Crews satirized the activities of Presidential Commissions, displaying his disapproval of American involvement in the then-ongoing Vietnam War.

The book is a transcription of the work of the fictional Patch Commission, a discussion among three government commissioners attempting to save the nation from disaster caused by pediatrician Benjamin Spock's overly permissive child-rearing guidelines.

Much of Crews's career has been dedicated to literary criticism.

In 1970, 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 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 Crews disparaged contemporary schools of literary criticism, especially that of Northrop Frye and his followers.

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.

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

It was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and won the Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay.

Though urged by readers to publish a follow-up volume, Crews delayed writing one until after his retirement in 1994, producing Postmodern Pooh in 2001.

While The Pooh Perplex parodies earlier trends in literary criticism, Postmodern Pooh parodies later trends in literary theory.

In it, Crews extends the satire of the original, covering more recent critical approaches such as deconstruction, feminism, queer theory, and recovered memory therapy, in part basing the essay authors and their approaches on actual academics and their work.

Crews has 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 (1995).

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

In 2017, he published Freud: The Making of an Illusion.