Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye was born July14, 1912 in Sherbrooke, Quebec. He was seven years old when he moved with his family to Moncton, New Brunswick. He attended Victoria School and Aberdeen High School, graduating in 1928 near the top of his class, not quite 16 years of age. A number of teachers and librarians encouraged him in his studies. His pursuits included music, scouts and bicycling.
In 1929 Frye left Moncton to study at the University of Toronto, where he remained as student and teacher most of the rest of his life. His mother died in Moncton in 1940 and is buried in the Elmwood Cemetery.
Northrop Frye was one of the most eminent scholars and thinkers in Canadian history. His first book, Fearful Symmetry (1947), a highly original study of the poetry of William Blake, is considered a classic critical work and garnered great praise for Frye. But it was with the publication of Anatomy of Criticism (1957), his immensely influential treatise on literary symbolism and structure, that he rose to international prominence as a literary theorist.
In the wake of the Anatomy, one distinguished American critic referred to Frye as "the foremost living student of Western literature." In the years following, he was to write more than twenty books on Western literature, culture, myth and archetypal theory, religion and social thought. In 1982, he published The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, the first of his two landmark works on the relationship between the Bible and Western literature, which made the best-seller lists in Canada.
Words With Power (1990), the companion volume, appeared just months before Frye's death in 1991. While many contemporary critics regard Frye's theories as having a distinguished obsolescence, the number of academic conferences and books on his work that appear yearly indicate that it is still highly relevant and that interest in his thinking continues unabated.
