James Erwin Schevill (June 10, 1920 – January 30, 2009) was an American poet, critic, playwright and professor at

San Francisco State University San Francisco State University (commonly referred to as San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a public research university in San Francisco. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers 118 different b ...

and

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

, and the recipient of Guggenheim and

Ford Foundation The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a US$25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. By 1947, after the death ...

fellowships.

Summary

He wrote more than 10 volumes of poetry, 30 plays, many essays, a novel, and biographies of

Bern Porter Bernard Harden Porter (born February 14, 1911, Porter Settlement in Houlton, Aroostook County, Maine – died June 7, 2004, in Belfast, Maine) was an American artist, writer, publisher, performer, and physicist. He was a representative of the avan ...

and

Sherwood Anderson Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and ...

. His plays include ''Lovecraft's Follies'' (1971) (based on the life and work of Providence horror writer H. P. Lovecraft), ''The Ushers'', ''Mother O'', ''Shadows of Memory'', ''The Last Romantics'', ''Cathedral of Ice'', ''The House on F Street'' and others. He received a literary award from the

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqua ...

for his plays. He also wrote the libretto for Jerome Rosen's opera ''. ''. He was visiting

Freiburg, Germany Freiburg im Breisgau (; abbreviated as Freiburg i. Br. or Freiburg i. B.; Low Alemannic: ''Friburg im Brisgau''), commonly referred to as Freiburg, is an independent city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. With a population of about 230,000 (as o ...

, in 1938 when the

Kristallnacht () or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (german: Novemberpogrome, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) paramilitary and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from ...

riots occurred, and the experience led him into writing and poetry. Other seminal experiences came from his own family background, travel, and during his Army service. He was influenced by his father, Rudolph Schevill, who created and chaired the department of romance languages at UC Berkeley, and created the West Coast committee in defense of the Spanish republic at the request of his friends

Pablo Casals Pau Casals i Defilló (Catalan: ; 29 December 187622 October 1973), usually known in English by his Castilian Spanish name Pablo Casals,

and Fernando de los Rios. His mother Margaret Schevill, was an artist, a scholar of Navaho culture and mythology, and a follower of

Carl Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philo ...

. As a German speaker, he worked for military intelligence and was assigned to a prisoner of war camp where, despite the denazification program, he saw that Nazis dominated other prisoners, as he described in his novel Cathedral of Ants (1976). In a 1950 letter to Robert Sproul, the president of the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...

, he refused to sign a

loyalty oath A loyalty oath is a pledge of allegiance to an organization, institution, or state of which an individual is a member. In the United States, such an oath has often indicated that the affiant has not been a member of a particular organization or ...

, at the time a prerequisite to becoming an instructor at the

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

. Instead he went on to teach at

California College of Arts and Crafts California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the mo ...

, San Francisco State University, where he headed the Poetry Center, and at Brown University until his retirement. In 1968, he signed the "

Writers and Editors War Tax Protest Tax resistance, the practice of refusing to pay taxes that are considered unjust, has probably existed ever since rulers began imposing taxes on their subjects. It has been suggested that tax resistance played a significant role in the collapse of ...

" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. In 1981 he received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in Drama and Performance Art. His contributions to the theater began with his strong involvement in the Actors Workshop in San Francisco, and his founding of Wastepaper Theater at Brown University as well as his collaborations with Trinity Reporatory Theater in Providence. He suffered a severe stroke in 1999 which made him a wheelchair user. He died in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...

, in January 2009.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Schevill, James American male poets 20th-century American dramatists and playwrights American tax resisters San Francisco State University faculty Writers from Berkeley, California 1920 births 2009 deaths American male essayists American male dramatists and playwrights 20th-century American poets 20th-century American biographers 20th-century American essayists Activists from California 20th-century American male writers Brown University faculty American male biographers