Frank

Joseph Frank (1918-2013) was an American literary scholar best known for his five-volume biography of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which he began in the early 1970s and completed in 2002. Born in New York City as Joseph Nathaniel Glassman, Frank adopted his stepfather's surname when his mother, Jennifer Garlick, remarried following his father's early death. Although he never formally earned a bachelor's degree, Frank studied briefly at New York University and the University of Wisconsin. Prior to beginning his Dostoyevsky project, he published essays and criticism in literary journals, including "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," which appeared in The Sewanee Review in 1945 and set the stage for his career as a critic and lecturer on 20th century literature. After working at the Bureau of National Affairs in Washington, D.C., in the 1940s, Frank left for Paris on a Fulbright scholarship in 1950, where he met his wife, the mathematician Marguerite Straus Frank, with whom he later had two daughters, Isabelle and Claudine. Frank earned his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 1960 and taught at the University of Wisconsin and Rutgers University. He was named the Class of 1926 Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he taught from 1966 until 1985, teaching afterward at Stanford University until his retirement. At Princeton, Frank also served as the Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism, which brought many international critics, artists, poets, and scholars to the university for lectures and discussions exploring the theory and practice of criticism in the humanities and sciences. He died at age 94 in Palo Alto, California.