Frederick Crews

Frederick Crews was an admired professor of literature and the author of fourteen books, some of which drew wide interest for their satirical or argumentative import. He died peacefully in the hospital at age 91 after a brief illness.

Crews was the son of Ruby Gaudet Crews and Maurice Augustus Crews, a Philadelphia patent attorney who later became U.S. Assistant Commissioner of Patents. Crews was educated at Germantown Academy, where he was valedictorian and co-captain of the tennis team. At Yale, he won six academic prizes and graduated summa cum laude in 1955. His prizewinning senior thesis on Henry James was published as a book in 1957.

Crews acquired a Princeton Ph.D. in English in a record three years and then permanently moved to California, where he served on the UC Berkeley faculty from 1958 until his retirement, as chair of the English department, in 1994. In 1959 he married Elizabeth (Betty) Peterson, with whom he had two daughters and who became a successful photographer for child development textbooks.

Crews began his academic career in a conventional way, publishing a monograph on the novelist E. M. Forster in 1962. In 1963, however, he surprised the world with a bestselling satire on literary criticism, The Pooh Perplex, which remains in print today. Many years later, in 2001, it would find a successor in the mordant Postmodern Pooh. Both books employed parody to lampoon fashionable trends in academic discourse.

In the mid-1960s Crews became an outspoken activist against the American war in Vietnam. In the same period, his intellectual interests focused on Freudian psychoanalysis, which he adapted to literary explanation in an influential study of Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1966. Soon, however, Crews developed doubts about the cogency of Freudian doctrine, and in 1980 he began to publish critiques of what he now regarded as a pseudoscience. One result was Skeptical Engagements (1986), and another was a 1993 article in The New York Review of Books entitled “The Unknown Freud.” That piece and a later denunciation of “recovered memory” psychotherapy elicited more controversy than any others in the history of the magazine. The whole affair, with protesting letters and Crews’s ripostes, became The Memory Wars (1995). In 2017 Crews would publish the lengthy biographical study Freud: The Making of an Illusion, the aim of which was to trace  the steps by which the founder of psychoanalysis gradually abandoned the empirical ethos. Writing in The New Yorker, Louis Menand characterized the book as having driven a stake “into its subject’s cold, cold heart.”

Crews’s other works include The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy (1992), which won a PEN award, and Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (2006). Each of those books was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. Both of them contained essays originally published in The New York Review of Books, for which Crews remained a contributor from 1964 to 2017. There he wrote critically on topics as varied as creationism, theosophy, the UFO cult, Big Pharma, and the Rorschach test.

As a teacher, Crews had a keen interest in standards of clarity in exposition. One product of that interest was a leading composition manual, The Random House Handbook (1974), which went through six editions and reached over a million readers. In Crews’s view, the handbook fit with all of his other publications since 1980, both polemical and humorous: all were aimed at puncturing pretense and advancing the cause of rational, evidentially grounded discourse.

At Berkeley, Crews won a Distinguished Teaching Award, a Faculty Research Lectureship, and the Berkeley Citation, and he was named a Berkeley Fellow. He also received Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and became a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. But from 2018 until his death he devoted himself to one cause: arguing for the innocence of Jerry Sandusky, whom he had come to know. In Crews’s view, Sandusky had been railroaded into prison through a combination of misplaced suspicion, pernicious “recovered memory” theory, and egregious prosecutorial misconduct.

Crews was an outdoorsman. He continued to run in local road races until age 72, and he remained a skier, swimmer, bodysurfer, and mountain hiker into his mid-eighties. He reluctantly abandoned his motorcycle at age 87.

He is survived by Elizabeth (Betty) Crews, his wife of almost 65 years; his children Gretchen Detre and Ingrid Crews; his grandchildren, Alejandro and Rebeca Márquez and Isabel and Aaron Detre; his great-granddaughter Yael Medrano Márquez; his sister, Frances James; and his nieces, Sigrid Bonner, Helen James, and Avis James. Long ago, he chose the sardonic text for his tombstone: “But I thought I had tenure!”

Memorial donations may be made to The Regional Parks Foundation, supporting the East Bay Regional Parks.

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