Through the Russian Prism

Joseph Frank is the author of an award-winning multivolume biography of Dostoevsky. (Bowker Author Biography) Joseph Frank, was born Joseph Nathaniel Glassman on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on October 6, 1918. He never earned a bachelor's degree, but attended classes at New York University and briefly studied at the University of Wisconsin. show more In 1942, he took an editorial job in Washington at the Bureau of National Affairs, a publisher of informational journals on legislation, policy and like subjects. Throughout the 1940s, he published essays and criticism in literary journals. Spatial Form in Modern Literature, which was a discussion of experimental treatments of space and time by Eliot, Joyce, Proust, Pound and others was published in The Sewanee Review in 1945 and propelled him to prominence as a theoretician. He went to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship in 1950. In 1952, he was accepted by the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he eventually received a Ph.D. He taught at numerous universities including the University of Minnesota, Rutgers University, Princeton University, and Stanford University. His five-volume life of Fyodor Dostoevsky is frequently cited among the greatest of 20th-century literary biographies. In 2009, he published a one-volume synopsis of the entire opus entitled Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. He died from pulmonary failure on February 27, 2013 at the age of 94. (Bowker Author Biography) show less