Background

Fred Benjamin Millett was born on February 19, 1890, in Brockton, Massachusetts, and was one of two sons of Daniel Edwin Millett and Mary Avalina Churchill Porter. He grew up in nearby Whitman, a small town where his grandfather owned a dairy farm. His father, widely read though largely self-taught, worked in a nearby shoe factory.

Education

A fragile child, Millett developed an early interest in books and libraries. In 1908, he graduated from Whitman Public High School as valedictorian and entered Amherst College. The Amherst years were sometimes difficult socially for the shy youngster, orphaned before his second college year. Nonetheless, he majored in English, participated in literary and theatrical events, made Phi Beta Kappa, and received his B. A. in 1912, magna cum laude. A position as lecturer in English took him to Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, where he remained until 1916. Summer graduate study at the University of Chicago led to a fellowship, but in 1918 the draft intervened. Following six months as a private stationed in Florida in the Medical Corps, Millett earned the rank of second lieutenant at Officers Training School. In 1919, Millett went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology as assistant professor of English. Although promoted to associate professor in 1926, he left the following year to accept a second assistant professorship at the University of Chicago. He completed his Ph. D. at Chicago in 1931 and in 1932, he regained the rank of associate professor.

Career

President Robert Maynard Hutchins was fighting hard for educational reform. Though Hutchins's emphasis on liberal undergraduate education appealed to Millett, there was also conflict with the dynamic president. Thus, in 1937, he accepted an appointment as visiting a professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, escaping from what he called "the tensions precipitated at Chicago by Robert Maynard Hutchins and his gang of intellectual camp-followers. " However tense, Millett's time at Chicago was productive. By 1937, he had edited and significantly revised a respected work of the 1920's, Contemporary British Literature (1935), co-edited The Art of the Drama (1935) with Gerald E. Bentley, and co-edited an anthology, The Play's the Thing (1936). Millett's appointment at Wesleyan, to him a "less contentious academy, " became permanent in 1939. His passion for educational reform, especially in the humanities, discomfited some of his colleagues, but others were enthusiastic. Among the latter were Wesleyan president Victor Butterfield and Professor Nathan Pusey, later president of Harvard University. As the years passed, Millett's intellectual breadth and gifted teaching were increasingly acknowledged by his peers.

As a consultant in 1942 and 1943 to the humanities division at the Rockefeller Foundation for a study on the rebirth of liberal education, he had additional opportunity to consider strategies. He directed Wesleyan's Honors College from 1943 until his retirement in 1958. The new Humanities Program, initiated in 1943, became the foundation of undergraduate education at the college for many years. Its aim was a creative, interdisciplinary exploration of the Western intellectual tradition. Small discussion groups were led by professors from different disciplines to function as "experienced learners, " not experts. A required "arts laboratory" to give first-year students "some personal experiences of the materials and methods of the arts" provided hands-on experience to balance analysis and criticism. For fifteen years Millett, a beloved teacher, served as the program's director. Though Wesleyan was not alone in introducing such changes, the university moved early in directions that became increasingly fashionable over succeeding decades. During these years, Millett also continued to write and publish.

Millett was named Olin Professor of English in 1952. From 1952 to 1954, he served as president of the American Association of University Professors, using the office to attack Senator Joseph McCarthy and the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee as vigilantes intent on destroying the academy's traditional freedoms. After his retirement in 1958, Millett served briefly as Distinguished Professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany. Otherwise, he divided his time between his Whitman home and Cape Cod, working on his journals and maintaining his interest in all the arts, as well as some scholarly activity. He edited the eighth edition of A History of English Literature in 1964, alert as ever to new literary developments. Millett died in Brockton.

Achievements

• From 1943 to 1958, Millett directed Wesleyan's Honors College. Under his aegis, this center for independent and often interdisciplinary research evolved as a cherished campus institution. Millett's impact on Wesleyan was most evident in his work on the design and implementation of a new freshman humanities program. On campus, he became a central figure in Wesleyan's exploration of new ways to present literature, religion, philosophy, and the fine arts to students. Alone and with others, he produced books praised for their impeccable scholarship and widely used as texts and works of reference. Although not on the front lines of research, he was far more than a codifier.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Craft-guilds of the thirteeth century in Paris

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Jolly junior
  • Carnegie Tech
  • Chicago Elegies
  • A Leaf of Bay
  • de Studiis
  • 1918: Excerpts from a Serviceman's Letters
  • Over Home
  • The Year Fourteen

Views

Firmly convinced of the unique contributions of the humanistic disciplines to civilization, he was equally certain of the need for greater curricular and instructional creativity to engage student interest. Contemporary American Authors (1940) presented brief analyses, biographies, and bibliographies of more than two hundred writers. A History of English Literature (1943) was the sixth edition of a very well known work by William V. Moody and Robert M. Lovett, first published before World War I. Here, as in several subsequent editions, and indeed in much of Millett's work, the challenge was to connect solid but outdated scholarship to the present. The Rebirth of Liberal Education (1945), more controversial than Millett's other work, argued for the primacy of the humanities in liberal education. It was attacked by some critics as disparaging and misunderstanding the natural and social sciences. His 1950 books Reading Fiction, Reading Drama, and Reading Poetry offered students and teachers instruction in rigorous, yet personal, methods of analysis to support close reading.

Personality

Millett's wide knowledge of English literature, a passion for bibliography, a commitment to be useful to students and teachers, a delight in pedagogic innovation, and a blessedly clear style characterized publication after publication. Especially useful were his revisions and updatings of earlier works.

Interests

• Millett's great passion was the theater, and he was also devoted to book collecting.

Connections

A lifelong bachelor and something of a loner, Millett was on excellent terms with his family, especially one nephew.

Father:

Daniel Edwin Millett

Mother:

Mary Avalina Churchill Porter

References

• Minor British Novelists (Crosscurrents Modern Critiques Series)
• Minor American Novelists (Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques)
• And Gladly Wolde he Lerne and Gladly Teche