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Francis Fergusson was a Harvard and Oxford-educated teacher and critic, a theorist of drama and mythology who wrote The Idea of a Theater, arguably the best and most influential book about drama written by an American. His readable, illuminating edition of Aristotle's Poetics, with Fergusson's introduction and notes, remains in print. His other works include Dante's Drama of the Mind: A Modern Reading of the Purgatorio, which includes his translations of many passages. In The Rarer Action, a volume in tribute to Francis Fergusson, the critic Allen Tate wrote: “The Idea of a Theater is a work comparable in range and depth with Eric Auerbach's Mimesis. There is no other work by an American critic of which this can be said.â€
Born in New Mexico, he received a Rhodes Scholarship and studied briefly at Oxford University before traveling to France where he befriended Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company. Returning to New York, he took acting classes with the Polish director Richard Boleslavski and wrote drama criticism for the Herald Tribune, making a reputation as a keen-minded and practical critic of American and classical European drama. In the early 1930s he founded the drama division of the then new Bennington College in southwestern Vermont. After nearly a decade at Bennington, he moved on to teach at the University of Indiana and then at Rutgers University where he taught comparative literature. Among his students were poet Robert Pinsky and fiction writer Alan Cheuse.
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