November/December 2010
Around the Quads
In Memoriam: Sir Frank Kermode
Sir Frank Kermode, the Julian Clarence Levi Professor Emeritus in the Humanities during the 1980s, died on August 17 at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 90.
Kermode, who was knighted in 1991, was one of the most distinguished literary critics of his generation, especially in his studies of Shakespeare and early modern literature. He published more than 50 books across a wide range of literature on authors as various as Beowulf, Homer, Philip Roth and Wallace Stevens. A prolific reviewer, he contributed frequently to The London Review of Books, which he helped create, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books. He became co-editor of Encounter in 1964. Kermode’s The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967, 2000) and The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (1979) have endured as classic works of criticism. His latest book, Concerning E.M. Forster, was published last December.
Kermode was born in Douglas, Isle of Man, and graduated from Liverpool University in 1940. He was a professor at King’s College, Cambridge and the University College of London before moving to the United States in 1982. He taught at Columbia, Harvard and Yale, and in 2003, he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Columbia.