Frank D. McConnell: A Brief Biography
Frank D. McConnell, born in 1942, first distinguished
himself in the 1960s as a graduate student in English at Yale University, where he studied under noted scholar and writer Harold Bloom and received his Ph.D.
in 1968. After teaching at Cornell University, he was hired as professor of
English at Northwestern University in 1971 and quickly made a name for himself
with an outpouring of books and articles on an amazing variety of topics,
including William Wordsworth, H. G. Wells, film, and contemporary American
novelists. In 1977, for the first of four times, he served on the committee
that awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In 1982, he became an English
professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and largely shifted
to more lucrative and creative endeavors, including a regular column on the
media for Commonweal magazine, book reviews for several major
newspapers, and four detective novels. He also began presenting a series of
brilliant and wildly amusing papers about science fiction at the annual J.
Lloyd Eaton Conferences on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, which soon
will be gathered together for the first time and published under the title The
Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science: Storytelling, Science Fiction,
and the Gnostic Imagination along with a Foreword by longtime friend Neil
Gaiman and tributes from eleven other friends and colleagues, including Harold
Bloom and Gregory Benford. A man beloved for his wit and wisdom wherever he
went, Frank McConnell died suddenly on January 17, 1999, ironically on the date
that he was scheduled to present the Keynote Address at the 1999 Eaton
Conference; the paper he had completed for the occasion, "The Science of
Fiction and the Fiction of Science: A Storytelling Animal in an Inhospitable
World," will finally be available to a wide audience in the aforementioned
collection. McConnell was survived by his second wife, Celeste McConnell
Barber, two children, and one stepson.
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