The Journal of Claude Fredericks

This first volume of The Journal Of Claude Fredericks extends from 1932, when the writer is eight years old, until the late summer of 1941, when the writer, now seventeen, leaves the town where he was born and goes off to Harvard to enter college. It is, in several different ways, a prelude to the many volumes that follow. All the themes that will be developed in rich detail in the following years are already sounded, the attitudes and conflicts that will constitute the dramatic tension in the entire journal are already clearly evident from the first childish scrawls in a five-year diary of a boy of eight to the time, in a hurried and impatient hand, angry and idealistic, a boy of seventeen is confronting life in many of its aspects head on.

Claude Fredericks was born in Missouri in 1923. He attended Harvard College in the early Forties, where he studied with Langdon Warner, John Finley, and Walter Clark, and later, in New York in the late Forties, he founded the Banyan Press, where for many years, in New York and in the country in Vermont, he printed by hand in limited editions unpublished work by Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, James Merrill, and many other writers. Plays of his were performed in New York by Julian Beck and Judith Malina at the Living Theatre and by Herbert Machiz at the Artists Theatre as well as by other groups elsewhere. For many years he taught, Greek, Italian, and Japanese literature, at Bennington College. He is, at present, with the collaboration of Marc Harrington, engaged in editing for publicatin in its entiretythe long journal he has been writing almost without intermission since he was eight years old. The manuscript of this journal, some fifty thousand pages in length, makes up part of the vast archive of the papers of Claude Fredericks at the Research Institute of The Getty Center in Los Angeles.