Francis Fergusson

Francis de Liesseline Fergusson (1904 – December 19, 1986) was an American actor, professor of comparative literature, literary critic, and theorist of drama and mythology. A Rhodes Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he appeared on Broadway in 1927 and 1928 in the plays Big Lake and Dr. Knock, and later became best known for his 1949 book The Idea of a Theatre: The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective.

Fergusson was born in 1904 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his father, Harvey Butler Fergusson, served as a congressman. His father died under mysterious circumstances in Albuquerque in 1915, his body discovered hanging from a cottonwood tree in the family garden with his throat cut. The trauma caused Fergusson to lose his appetite for four years, and the resulting malnutrition left him with a spinal hump. Around 1917 or 1918, he relocated with his mother, Clara, to Manhattan, leaving behind an older brother and two sisters in New Mexico. His mother supported the household by working as a decorator of chinaware. In New York, Fergusson attended the Bronx High School of Science before completing his secondary education at the Ethical Culture School, where he befriended J. Robert Oppenheimer and Jeannette Mirsky.

In 1921, Fergusson enrolled at Harvard University on a partial scholarship, concentrating his studies on biology, Dante scholarship, and philosophy under Raphael Demos, while also beginning to write poetry and a novel. Oppenheimer joined him at Harvard a year later. In 1923, Fergusson was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to The Queen's College, Oxford, where he initially read biology under Charles Scott Sherrington before switching to modern greats — philosophy, politics, and economics — after concluding he lacked the necessary aptitude for mathematics. During the summers of 1924 and 1925, he attended the French symposia Décades de Pontigny at Pontigny Abbey and became acquainted with Lady Ottoline Morrell. In the Christmas vacation of 1925–26, Fergusson and Oppenheimer, then teaching at Cambridge, spent time together in Paris. Their friendship was strained when Oppenheimer, after learning that Fergusson had proposed to his girlfriend Frances Keeley and been accepted, attempted to strangle him; Oppenheimer later apologized by letter. Fergusson graduated from Oxford in 1926 with a Second-Class honors degree.

That same year, a production by the Old Vic company moved Fergusson to commit his life to theatre. Returning to the United States, he took an apartment on East 58th Street in Manhattan and began an apprenticeship at the American Laboratory Theatre, where he remained until 1930. The Theatre operated under the directorship of Richard Boleslawski and Maria Ouspenskaya and was aligned pedagogically with the Moscow Art Theatre and Konstantin Stanislavski; Fergusson received training across every aspect of theatrical production. It was during this period that he developed his central directorial principle of fidelity to the text, and it was also there that he met his first wife, Marion Crowne, whom he married in 1931. His Broadway appearances in Big Lake and Dr. Knock in 1927 and 1928 fell within this formative period at the Laboratory Theatre. The institution closed in 1930 as a consequence of the Great Depression.

Following the closure, Fergusson worked as a theatre critic for two literary journals: The Bookman, until 1932, and Hound and Horn, of which he eventually became editor, succeeding his friend Richard Blackmur, until the journal ceased publication in 1934. Without a doctorate or an American master's degree, he lectured at the New School for Social Research from 1932 to 1934. From 1934 to 1947, he and his wife were among the early faculty at Bennington College in Vermont, where he taught theatre and criticism while Marion Crowne taught acting. In 1947, Oppenheimer, recently appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, invited Fergusson to teach there. It was at the Institute that Fergusson wrote The Idea of a Theatre: The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective, published by Princeton University Press in 1949. When Fergusson's protégé R. W. B. Lewis introduced him to Albert Camus in Paris in 1958, Camus described the book as the best work on tragedy he had read.

From 1949 to 1952, Fergusson served as the inaugural director of the Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism, later renamed the Christian Gauss Seminars in Literary Criticism, funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation. He was a visiting professor of English at Indiana University from 1952 to 1953, then joined Rutgers University, where he taught until his retirement in 1969 under the title of University Professor, a position created specifically for him by the university's president. In 1963, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

Among Fergusson's close friends were the color field painter Paul Feeley, a Bennington colleague with whom he fished for trout; the writer Paul Horgan, a childhood acquaintance from Albuquerque; the composer Roger Sessions; the writer Allen Tate; the academic Joseph Frank; and the publisher Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company. His first wife, Marion Crowne, died of cancer in 1959, and he married Peggy Kaiser in 1962. Fergusson died on December 19, 1986, at Princeton Hospital following a long illness, having suffered from Parkinson's disease in his later years. He was 82. He was survived by his second wife; his son, Harvey; his daughter, actress Honora Neumann, who had been married to Jamaican writer Evan Jones; and five grandchildren.