Death of a Rebel tells the story of Charles Andrews Fenton (1919-1960), a charismatic teacher, scholar, and writer who took his own life by jumping from the top of the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham, North Carolina. At the time he was apparently at the peak of his career. He had written excellent books on Hemingway and Stephen Vincent Benet, had three other books in press, and was working on a new version of his novel about World War II (a 1945 account won the Doubleday Twentieth Century Fox award). He had earned Guggenheim and ACLS grants. Students flocked to his courses. He was widely regarded as the most popular professor at Duke. Charlie Fenton's story is a compelling one, and takes on further meaning in the context of the times. An individualist during the notoriously conformist 1950s, he swam against the current, defying authority and openly inviting controversy. This jaunty refusal to accept received wisdom made him an appealing figure to many of his students and colleagues. But it was a dangerous stance that did not sit well with his superiors, and it cost him when his fortunes took a turn for the worse in the spring and summer of 1960. Love and war had a lot to do with his suicide as well. Charlie Fenton, who had come down to Duke from Yale two years earlier with a promotion to full professor, fell in love with one of his graduate students. His wife, outraged, left and took their son Andy with her. The scandal left him alone and a social pariah around campus. Then he suffered one of his bouts of depression. Usually these periods were triggered by trauma, most of it derived from his service as a tail gunner with the RAF bomber command in the summer and fall of 1942. In the past he'd always been able to shake free of his despondency. This time he was overcome by psychological pain deriving from loss: of wife and family, of public admiration, of companionship, and worst of all, of self-regard. The book recounts Fenton's last days in vivid detail. In writing it, Donaldson had the assistance of family members, of his devoted students, and even -- at a painful distance -- of the woman he fell in love with fifty years ago. They all share an abiding sense of what might have been, and a deep regret that he could not go on to inspire the uncounted students who would never get to know and admire and learn from him.
| ISBN | 1611474930 | | Pages | 198 | | ISBN13 | 9781611474930
(What's this?) | | Weight (grammes) | 435 | | Publisher | Fairleigh Dickinson University Press | | Published in | Cranbury | | Imprint | Fairleigh Dickinson University Press | | Height (mm) | 240 | | Format | Hardback | | Width (mm) | 160 | | Publication date | 29 Dec 2011 | | Spine width (mm) | 16 | | DEWEY | 810.9 | | Academic level | General | | DEWEY edition | DC21 | |
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Introduction First Sighting Bomber Boy The Young Academic Hemingway vs. Fenton Carving a Career A Different Planet Sailing through Air What Might Have Been Acknowledgments Notes on Sources A Charles A. Fenton Bibliography Other Works Consulted
"Death of a Rebel provides an incredibly sharp and detailed picture of a very specific era -- 1945--1960 -- through the prism of Charlie Fenton's floundering and eventual flowering. Anyone who lived during that period will recognize the freshness of that picture." -- -- Calvin Skaggs, prizewinning film producer and director "Scott Donaldson's book on Charlie Fenton is fine indeed, incisive, well-written, compassionate, and also 'tough' where it deserves to be: Charlie himself took no prisoners, and I think he would have approved." -- -- Peter Matthiessen, novelist and non-fiction writer, twice winner of the National Book Award "This fascinating biography of the maverick scholar Charlie Fenton proves that the groves of academe, during the 1950s, were much as they are today--a dangerous place for anyone who won't follow the rules." -- -- James L. W. West III, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University
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