Frederick Crews

1933 - 2024

Frederick Crews
02/20/1933 - 06/21/2024
Frederick (Fred) Crews, a widely admired professor, author, and champion of rational thinking, died peacefully at age 91 on June 21, 2024, after a brief illness. He was a remarkable man who will be remembered with enormous fondness and respect.
Fred was born in Philadelphia to Ruby Gaudet Crews and Maurice Augustus Crews, who instilled in their children their own love of books. He became valedictorian and co-captain of his high school tennis team at Germantown Academy, and went on to study English at Yale, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1955. He acquired a Princeton Ph.D. in English in a record three years and then 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, who would go on to become a successful photographer for child development textbooks. Together they had two daughters, Gretchen and Ingrid, whom they raised in Berkeley (with a three-year detour in Bolinas).
After beginning his career by publishing more conventional academic works, in 1963 Fred surprised the world with a bestselling satire on literary criticism, "The Pooh Perplex," which used parody to lampoon fashionable academic trends. And in 1974, he published a leading composition manual, "The Random House Handbook," which took an unpretentiously humorous approach to teaching good writing; it went through six editions and reached over a million readers.
In 1980 Fred began to publish critiques of Freudian doctrine, which he had come to see 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 Fred's replies, became "The Memory Wars" (1995). In 2017, he would publish the lengthy biographical study "Freud: The Making of an Illusion," which Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker, described as having driven a stake "into its subject's cold, cold heart."
Fred received numerous honors and awards over the course of his career. At Berkeley, he won a Distinguished Teaching Award, a Faculty Research Lectureship, and the Berkeley Citation, and he was named a Berkeley Fellow. He was a Fulbright Scholar, received a Guggenheim fellowship, was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and became a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. And the 14 books he published received recognition that included both a PEN award and two nominations as finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award.
Fred was an avid outdoorsman. He continued to run in local road races until age 72, and he remained a skier, swimmer, bodysurfer, and mountain hiker into his eighties. He reluctantly abandoned his motorcycle at age 87, and his wetsuit at age 90.
He was an overwhelmingly decent man, who worked hard to right wrongs even when it was unpopular to do so. In the mid-1960s he became an outspoken activist against the American war in Vietnam. And from 2018 until his death he devoted himself to arguing for the innocence of Jerry Sandusky, who in his view had been railroaded into prison through a combination of misplaced suspicion, baseless "recovered memory" theory, and egregious prosecutorial misconduct.
Fred was also kind, funny, and down-to-earth. People who expected, based on his writing, to encounter an intimidating critic were surprised to find a wonderfully likable man who would engage with warmth and humor on almost any topic. He had both a sly wit and a broad sense of humor. He loved to quote from his favorite movies, "Airplane!" and "The Three Amigos," and he loved Philadelphia scrapple (almost) as much as his wife's gourmet cooking.
Fred 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.
At Fred's request, there will be no memorial service; but for anyone who wants to know, his favorite charity was the Regional Parks Foundation.