Frederick C. Crews *58

Fred died June 21, 2024, in Oakland, Calif., at age 91.

Born in Philadelphia in 1933, he graduated with a degree in English from Yale in 1955. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Princeton in 1958.

Fred served on the UC Berkeley faculty from 1958 until his retirement in 1994. After publishing more conventional academic works, in 1963 he published a bestselling satire on literary criticism, The Pooh Perplex, using parody to lampoon fashionable academic trends. In 1974, he published The Random House Handbook, which took a humorous approach to teaching good writing; it went through six editions and reached more than a million readers.

Fred published critiques of Freudian doctrine, which he considered a pseudoscience. They included Skeptical Engagements (1986), and a 1993 article in The New York Review of Books entitled “The Unknown Freud.” That piece and protesting letters and Fred’s replies became The Memory Wars (1995). His 2017 biographical study Freud: The Making of an Illusion, was described by Louis Menand in The New Yorker as having driven a stake “into its subject’s cold, cold heart.”

Fred is survived by Elizabeth, his wife of almost 65 years; children Gretchen and Ingrid; four grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.

Graduate alumni memorials are prepared by the APGA.