H. Bruce Franklin

Howard Bruce Franklin (born February 1934) is an American cultural historian and scholar.

He is notable for receiving top awards for his lifetime scholarship in fields as diverse as American studies, science fiction, prison literature and marine ecology.

He has written or edited twenty books and three hundred professional articles and participated in making four films.

His main areas of academic focus are science fiction, prison literature, environmentalism, the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and American cultural history.

He was instrumental in helping to debunk false public speculation that Vietnam was continuing to hold prisoners of war.

He helped to establish science fiction writing as a genre worthy of serious academic study.

Born in February 1934, Franklin held numerous jobs in Brooklyn, New York, while working his way through college.

From 1951 to 1952, he was a batch worker at the Mayfair Photofinishing Company.

In 1953, he was an upholsterer for the Carb Manufacturing Company, and in 1954 was promoted to foreman of the shipping department.

He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1955 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

From 1955 to 1956, he was a tugboat deckhand and mate for the Pennsylvania RR Marine department, based in Jersey City, New Jersey.

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In 1956, he married Jane Morgan, a graduate of Duke University.

They had three children together.

He served in the United States Air Force from 1956 to 1959 as a navigator and intelligence officer.

When he returned to the United States in the late 1960s, he became a prominent activist in the movement against the Vietnam War.

Franklin earned his doctorate from Stanford University in 1961.

He was also a lecturer in San Jose, California's municipal adult education department from 1963 to 1964.

He became an expert on American writers, particularly Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

At one point, he served as president of the Melville Society.

His first book, The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology, examined Melville's use of mythologies and intellectual milieu from Meso-American to Sanskrit.

Franklin wrote a scholarly edition of Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, which traced obscure classical and "alien" references embedded in Melville's prose.

He was hired that year at the university as an assistant professor of English; he was promoted to associate professor in 1965.

In 1966, he resigned his commission in the Air Force Reserve as a protest against the Vietnam War.

Franklin and his family spent a year in France from 1966 to 1967.

He taught for six months at Stanford's campus in Tours, France, and then moved in Paris.

There he and his wife Jane studied Marxist theory, helped organize the Free University of Paris, and participated in setting up the European network of GI deserters, who were primarily young men opposed to the Vietnam War.

In 1968, Franklin was one of twenty-four founders of the Revolutionary Union.

After Franklin left the RU, the organization became the Revolutionary Communist Party.

The organization was infiltrated by the FBI, which planted informers within the leadership of the group to heighten members' "suspicions of each other".

Franklin was fired from Stanford University in 1972 for allegedly inciting students to riot in connection with those activities.

The termination brought nationwide attention to the issue of academic freedom.

Franklin was arrested in December 1972 for harboring Ronald Beaty, a federal fugitive after being freed in October during a prison transfer in which one guard was killed and another wounded.

Franklin became a tenured full professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University–Newark in 1975.

He also held the John Cotton Dana endowed chair at the institution from 1987 until retiring in 2015.

As of 2023, he retains the title of professor emeritus.

In 2008, the American Studies Association awarded him the Pearson-Bode Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies.

A critic of the Vietnam War, he was one of the founding members of the Revolutionary Union, heading its Palo Alto chapter.

After a split within the party, he became the leader of a new organization,Venceremos.

Venceremos was a largely Chicano Third Worldist organization.