Philip Freund

FREUND--Philip, author and educator, Fordham University Professor Emeritus, died on December 20 at 98, after a short illness. He was born in Vancouver, Canada. He sent prize-winning stories and poems to the Detroit News before he was ten, began college at 16 and almost immediately began to write for the Cornell University literary magazine of which he became editor. While pursuing his long academic career, initially at Cornell, from which he graduated in 1929 and Fordham University where he taught courses in creative writing, film, and entertainment and the arts, he published eight novels, thirteen plays, nine short-story collections, as well as poetry, essays, literary criticism, and other nonfiction. The last thirty years of his long life were devoted to researching and writing a massive history of the theater, "Stage by Stage," published in four volumes the last of which will be available in 2008. The series has been reviewed as one of the most important studies of theater in the 20th century. Amazingly, he was fully productive up to the last few weeks of a life that spanned nearly a century. Philip Freund was a polymath and wide-ranging cosmopolitan but mainly a consummate human being. His many friends will miss his dry wit and his erudite, wise and always gracious counsel.