Death of a Rebel: The Charlie Fenton Story

by Scott Donaldson

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Author: Scott Donaldson

Publisher: University Press Copublishing Division

Paperback:
ISBN 10: 1611476240
ISBN 13: 978-1611476248

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. 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.

Review

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)

Writing a successful biography demands a close and compassionate identification between author and subject. Biography exacts a staggering cost in time and energy: extensive and expensive travel; toil in archival excavation; potentially fraught interviews with sources, some of them reluctant or hostile or even duplicitous.

His objective in Death of a Rebel is, frankly, personal. The book is a labor of love, testifying to 'what was forfeited with Charlie Fenton’s tragic death.'

In paying homage to a man who affected him so profoundly, Donaldson also affirms the passion for the literature itself that both of them shared.

Donaldson’s purpose is accomplished by radical narrative means. Death of a Rebel is a biography with a remarkably revealing autobiographical dimension. The author stands as close to the reader as to the subject—making him or her a guest, not just an eavesdropping observer, at the wine-laced lunch he fantasizes at some typical mla convention. Readers are placed around the same table as the imagined participants.

To tell this story, Donaldson casts a backward look over his own bright college years, when, as a member of Yale’s class of 1950, he met Fenton as an instructor in Daily Themes: a course, first offered in 1907, designed as a Parris Island boot camp for the few, the proud, the Marine Corps of aspiring writers.

To write an honest biography, but also an artful one, Donaldson has adopted the tactic of purposefully exposing his own dishonesty. By putting his own flawed humanity on the line along with Fenton’s, Donaldson asserts that student and teacher have become as one in their capacity as professors in the root sense, and that they are correctly to be judged in reference to each other by the same rigorous standards.

Death of a Rebel is a crowning achievement for a biographer who has qualified again and again as one of our best. (Project Muse)

Donaldson has certainly justified Fenton’s support; he has become one of our leading critics and biographers of twentieth-century American literature. His books and essays all display a welcome and rare combination of meticulous research and readable prose

…he “owed to his memory to tell the story as well as I could.” This he has certainly done, bringing to the narrative of Fenton’s life and career the same effective blend of indefatigable archival skills and the gift of telling a compelling story in an engaging manner that he has displayed in his earlier work.

Donaldson’s chapter on Fenton’s World War II service is one of the most compelling sections of his book. Deftly and expertly drawing on histories of the war and on extensive quotations from Fenton’s correspondence with his parents and from the highly autobiographical fiction he wrote about his war experiences, he paints a graphic first-hand portrait of a military career filled with missteps and self-inflicted punishments

By combing through the university’s teaching evaluations and conducting interviews with many of Fenton’s students, Donaldson has amassed a great deal of eloquent and specific testimony to Fenton’s skill

Again because Donaldson has mined the primary documents so thoroughly, he is able to quote from and paraphrase extensively letters exchanged between the two (Hemingway), as well as correspondence with others in which Hemingway discussed Fenton’s project. The result is not only a highly authentic account of a significant period in Fenton’s life but also a valuable stand-alone essay on the vicissitudes of a critic trying to work with a living writer on a study of his work.

While Donaldson does list various possible causes, what is best about Death of a Rebel is that it gives us, convincingly and in depth, all the available, mostly first-hand, evidence we need to determine an answer while at the same time permitting the reader to draw his own conclusions. That this conclusion, whatever it may be, will be securely based on reliable evidence clearly and objectively presented, is the greatest tribute one can pay to this fine biography. In the end, while Charlie Fenton’s life was extraordinary in many respects, Donaldson’s book makes clear that we definitively assess and simplify any life at our peril.

(Hopkins Review)

The book is a labor of love, testifying to “what was forfeited with Charlie Fenton’s tragic death”- tragic not merely because his work, admirable as it was, did not reach its apogee, but also because so many students were robbed of this rare spirit’s charismatic teaching, denied the spark of an idealism so highly charges that it changes lives, including that of the author himself, one of the few remaining witnesses to Fenton in his prime.

This is Donaldson’s own last will and testament to the Age of the Book, issued from beyond the cusp of the electronic revolution that has laid it to rest forever

To write an honest biography, but also an artful one, Donaldson has adopted the tactic of purposefully exposing his own dishonestly.

Death of a Rebel is a crowning achievement for a biographer who has qualified again and again as one of our best. Had Fenton lived, he surely would have retracted his lacerating judgment. We can be certain that it has not been permanently dislodged from Donaldson’s mind. (Project Muse)

Bringing to the narrative of Fenton’s life and career the same effective blend of indefatigable archival skills and the gift of telling a compelling story in an engaging manner that he has displayed in his earlier work.

By combing through the university’s teaching evaluations and conducting interviews with many of Fenton’s students, Donaldson has amassed a great deal of eloquent and specific testimony to Fenton’s skill and popularity in the classroom

What is best about Death of a Rebel is that it gives us, convincingly and in depth, all the available, mostly first-hand, evidence we need to determine an answer while at the same time permitting the reader to draw his own conclusions. That this conclusion, whatever it may be, will be securely based on reliable evidence clearly and objectively presented, is the greatest tribute one can pay to this fine biography. In the end, while Charlie Fenton’s life was extraordinary in many respects, Donaldson’s book makes clear that we definitively assess and simplify any life at our peril. (Hopkins Review)

Donaldson’s account should appeal to many teachers, capturing well how colleagues, administrators, and students can both aid and impede a career

Donaldson’s biography pays a debt of gratitude to a professor who inspired him in the classroom, guided him through a senior thesis, and exemplified a career he could emulate, but mystified him by committing suicide at forty years of age. (The Hemingway Review)

About the Author

Scott Donaldson is one of the nation's leading biographers. This is his 18th book.

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Death of a Rebel: The Charlie Fenton Story