Northrop Frye fonds. - 1906-1991. - 18.0925 m of textual records. - 62 sound cassettes. - 13 sound tape reels. - 4 film reels. -13 videocassettes. - 520 photographs: b&w; 198 photographs: col.; 139 photographs: b&w negatives; 8 photographs: col. negatives. -13 artifacts.
Herman Northrop Frye was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, on July 14, 1912, the son of Herman Edward Frye and Catherine Maud Howard. He spent his childhood in Quebec and New Brunswick. His primary and secondary education in Moncton, New Brunswick was followed by a business training course. In 1929 he entered Victoria College in the University of Toronto and graduated in 1933 in the Honour course in Philosophy and English, standing first in first class honours each year. He then followed the theological course at Emmanuel College and was ordained in the United Church of Canada in 1936. Realizing that his vocation lay in university teaching, he attended Merton College, Oxford, from 1936 to 1937 and from 1938- 1939. He graduated with first class honours in the English School and received the Oxford M.A. in 1940. In 1939 he joined the Department of English at Victoria College as a Lecturer, and became Assistant Professor in 1942, Associate Professor in 1946, Professor in 1947, Chairman of the Department of English (Victoria College) in 1952, and Principal of Victoria College in 1959. On January 1, 1967, he retired from the Principalship and became University Professor in the University of Toronto, continuing to teach as a Professor of English at Victoria. From 1978 until his death in January 199l he was Chancellor of Victoria University.
In August 1937 he married his Victoria College classmate, Helen Kemp. Two years after her death in 1986 he married Elizabeth Brown, also a classmate from Victoria.
From 1932 to 1933 he was editor of Acta Victoriana and from 1948 to 1952 editor of the Canadian Forum. He was Chairman of the English Sub-Committee of the Governor General's Literary Awards Committee from 1959 to 1962, and became Chairman of the whole Committee in 1962. From 1960 to 1963 he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Ontario Curricu lum Institute, and of its Executive Committee. He was a member of the National Council of Teachers' of English Commission on Literature, and of the Scholarship Committee of the American Council of Learned Societies, and an advisory member of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission from 1968 to 1977.
In 1951 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He received the Royal Society's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1958, the Canada Council Medal in 1967, the Royal Society's Pierre Chauveau Medal in 1970, the Molson Prize in 1971, and the Royal Bank Award in 1978 for distinguished contributions to Canadian literature. In 1987 he won the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction for Northrop Frye and Shakespeare and the Toronto Arts Lifetime Achievement Award and, in 1990, the Mondello Prize in Italy for his lifetime dedication to literature. He was selected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969 and made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1972. In 1974 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and received a Civic Honour from the City of Toronto. He was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1975, a Foreign Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1976, and an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1981. He was a Trustee of the English Institute, of which he was Chairman in 1953, and a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association of America from 1958 to 1961, after which he became Chairman of its Nominating Committee. He rejoined the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association of America in 1974, becoming President in 1976.
An internationally recognized scholar, he lectured at over one hundred universities in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, Japan, New Zealand, Italy, Israel, Australia and the former Soviet Union, and taught a full term or a summer session at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Indiana, Washington, British Columbia, Cornell, Berkeley and Oxford. He gave many special lectures for endowed lecture series. He received the degree of LL.D from Carleton University in 1957, from Queen's University in 1962, from the University of Saskatchewan and Franklin and Marshall College in 1968, from the University of Victoria, British Columbia in 1969, and from the Royal Military College of Canada in 1976; the degree of D.D. from the University of Winnipeg (then United College) in 1958, and McGill University in 1983; the degree of D.Litt. from the University of New Brunswick in 1960, from Mount Allison in 1962, from the University of British Columbia in 1963, from the University of Manitoba in 1964, from St. Lawrence University in 1966, from Dartmouth College in 1967, from Acadia University, the University of Western Ontario, York University, and from Middlebury College, Vermont in 1969, from the University of Windsor in 1970, from the University of Waterloo and Harvard University in 1972, from the University of Toronto in , from Eastern Michigan University in 1981, from Columbia University in 1983, and from Oxford University in 1987; the degree of D. de l'U from the Universite de Montreal in 1980; the degree of L.H.D. from Princeton University in 1966, from the University of Chicago in 1967, from the University of California at Irvine in 1969, from Boston College in 1972, from Coe College, lowa and the Universite de Sherbrooke in 1976, from Bates College, Maine in 1978, and from Arizona State University in 1985. The degree of Doctor of Athabasca University was conferred in 1985 and he received an honorary degree in Modern Lan- guages from the University of Bologna in 1989. The degree of D.C.L. from Bishop's University was conferred in 1990 as well as an honorary degree from the University of Zagreb. He was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University from 1970 to 1975 and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University for the year 1974-75.
He had a considerable influence on the planning of curricula in English and on the teaching of English in elementary and secondary schools throughout the United States and Canada. In particular, he was Supervisory Editor of a series of text books with the covering title Literature: Uses of the Imagination published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc.
From 1950 to 1960 he wrote the annual critical and bibliographical survey of Canadian poetry for Letters in Canada, University of Toronto Quarterly. He edited fifteen books, contributed essays and chapters to over sixty others and published over one hundred articles and reviews. His chief publications are: Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, 1947; Anatomy of Criticism, 1957; The Well-Tempered Critic, 1963; The Educated Imagination, 1963; T.S. Eliot, 1963; Fables of Identity, 1963; A Natural Perspective, 1965; The Return of Eden, 1965; Fools of Time, 1967; The Modern Century, 1967; A Study of English Romanticism, 1968; The Stubborn Structure, 1970; The Bush Garden, 1971; The Critical Path, 1971; The Secular Scripture, 1976; Spiritus Mundi, 1976; Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature, 1978; Creation and Recreation, 1980; The Great Code, 1982; Divisions on a Ground, 1982; The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Comedies, 1983; Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 1986; No Uncertain Sounds, 1988; Northrop Frye on Education, 1988; Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays 1974-1988, 1990; Words with Power, 1990; Reading the World -Selected writings, 1935-1976, 1990; The Double Vision, 1991; A World in a Grain of Sand: Twenty-two Interviews with Northrop Frye, 1991.
A critical discussion of his work, with a bibliography appeared in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism (Columbia University Press,1966); a full bibliography, including reviews and other discussions of his work in Northrop Frye: An Enumerative Bibliography (The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1974) and Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (University of Toronto Press, 1987), both by Robert Denham; Northrop Frye: A Biography (Random House) by John Ayre was published in 1989 and a critical study, Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism (University of Toronto Press) by A.C. Hamilton was published in 1990.
The greater part of the Northrop Frye fonds was given to the Victoria University Library by Northrop Frye at irregular intervals from 1967 to 1990. After the death of Frye in January 1991 there were further accruals of correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, essays, articles, speeches, notebooks and other literary files. These were transferred to the Library by Jane Widdecombe, lan Morrison and Elizabeth Brown Frye. The files include papers from Frye's offices in Massey College and Northrop Frye Hall and from his private residence in Toronto. The fonds consists of nine series: correspondence files; literary files; personal files; professional files; audio-visual records; publications by Northrop Frye; files about Northrop Frye; artifacts; miscellaneous printed files.
N. Frye on Myth
University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada NORTHROP FRYE CENTER