Peter A. Fritzell

Peter A. Fritzell, age 81, of Appleton, passed away peacefully at home on December 7,2021 after a prolonged battle with prostate cancer.
Born on August 23, 1940 in Minneapolis, MN to Kenneth E. and Stella (Houge) Fritzell, he grew up in Grand Forks, ND.
In his youth, he was a pretty good athlete-particularly in golf, but also in basketball and middle-distance running. In his college years at the University of North Dakota, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he majored in both philosophy and English, and became a bit of a scholar and a writer, author of a feisty and sometimes satiric weekly column in the North Dakota Student. Upon graduation in 1962, he married the love of his life and lifelong caregiver, Marlys Lee Smith. With her ongoing support, he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, in English and American Literature and the Humanities. In 1966 he and his family came to Appleton and to Lawrence University, where he became known as a popular but demanding teacher. During his time at Lawrence, he served not only as chair of the English Department and Director of the London Study Center, but also as a member of presidential and vice-presidential search committees and long-range planning groups, as chair of tenure committees, and even briefly as golf coach.
For his scholarship, he was awarded two, year-long fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, during one of which he served as a Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College. In the summers of 1968, '74, and '77, he and his family returned to Stanford, where he taught as a visiting professor in the Humanities Program. At various times, he served on the Boards of Directors of the Appleton Youth Hockey Association, the Forest History Society, the Appleton Medical Center Foundation, and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. He was a member of the Modern Language Association, the American Studies Association, Ducks Unlimited, Delta Waterfowl, and the Ruffed Grouse Society-as well as a volunteer for LoonWatch and the Citizen Lake Monitoring Network of Wisconsin.
As teacher, he was recognized with Lawrence's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1988. As scholar, he wrote and published numerous reviews, articles, and essays on 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th-century American literature, including an essay on Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac that has been called "the most insightful study of A Sand County Almanac, as a whole, ever made." He was the only literary scholar invited to participate in the first National Symposium on Wetlands in 1978, and to contribute a chapter to the book that resulted from that symposium. In comparable fashion, in 1982-83 he contributed a lecture to the symposium on The Social and Environmental History of the Great Lakes Forest, and a chapter to the book that resulted from it.
With continuing support from Lawrence, in 1989-90, he saw to publication his own scholarly book, Nature Writing and America: Essays Upon a Cultural Type, characteristically a demanding work, but which has received responsive notices and elaborations in several languages from scholars on virtually every continent. In 1990, he became the first Patricia Hamar Boldt Professor of Liberal Studies at Lawrence. In 1999, the English Department of his undergraduate alma mater awarded him the Maxwell Anderson Alumni Award for Outstanding Achievement in Arts and Letters.
He adored his children and grandchildren and took great pride in all their accomplishments. He passed his love of the outdoors on to them, spending many hours with them at the cabin up north and by the duck sloughs of North Dakota.
In his later years, he turned a portion of his attention back toward the game of golf, though with a notably diminished swing. He was a long-term member of the Good Fellowship League and the Men's Club at Reid Golf Course; and he treasured his time with their members, as with the Good Old Guys at Chaska and the men's league at the Park Falls Country Club up north, as well as the Men's Club at Haven in Green Valley, Arizona. His later writings, in turn, were dedicated to meditative narratives and poems about the formative and lasting devotion of his life, the world of the outdoors-especially the dogs who occupied his mind and commanded his own and his family's commitments, in the forests of Wisconsin and on the windswept grasslands of his North Dakota homeland.
He was preceded in death by his parents, his sister Anne, and brothers-in-law, Ugur Hanhan and Wayne Isaacson. He is survived by his wife of 59 years, Marlys, sons Peter, Jr. (Susan) (Ames, IA) and John (Dawn) (Appleton, WI) and grandchildren Stella, Paul, Rachel and Kenneth, and sister Sara Hanhan (LaPorte, MN), brother Erik (Ell) (Grand Forks, ND) and sister-in-law Dorothy Isaacson (Hot Springs, AR).
If so inclined, the family would appreciate contributions to the Peter A. Fritzell Endowed Scholarship Fund at Lawrence University (Office of Development, 711 E. Boldt Way, Appleton, WI 54911) or to a charity of one's choosing.
The family would like to extend a sincere thank you to Theda Care at Home Hospice for the care they took to help keep Peter comfortable at home.
A celebration of Peter's life will be held at a future date.