Frederick Benjamin Kaye

Background

Frederick Benjamin Kaye was born Frederick Benjamin Kugelman on April 20, 1892 in New York City, New York, United States, the son of Julius Gustav Kugelman and Carrie Stern Kugelman.

Education

Kaye attended Columbia Grammar School, Hotchkiss School, and Phillips Academy, Andover. Later he entered, in the fall of 1909, Yale University, where he received successively the degrees of Bachelor of Arts (1914), Master of Arts (1916), and Doctor of Philosophy (1917).

Career

In the fall of 1917 Frederick Benjamin became an instructor in English in Northwestern University, where he proceeded through the various ranks to a professorship in 1929. His connection with Northwestern, which continued until his death, was interrupted only by his service in the United States Naval Reserve Force, which he entered in May 1918, retiring from active service a year later with the rank of ensign. His name was changed to Kaye in September 1919, as he had found that the Teutonic sound of Kugelman was a considerable handicap to his scholarly work in Europe during the post-war period.

The several protracted illnesses from which he suffered from his early years did not overcome his keen and witty mind or his generous and enthusiastic disposition. His remarkable capacity for work was, however, impaired during the last three years of his life by the progress of the disease of which he eventually died (chromophobe adenoa of the pituitary gland) in Boston, in February 1930.

Many of Kaye's stories and essays contributed to college publications in his undergraduate days were written in a grotesquely humorous vein which he neglected to develop after leaving Yale. He wrote and published with increasing frequency, however, on topics of general and of scholarly interest. In 1927 he published A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620-1800, compiled in collaboration with Ronald S. Crane. A revised and expanded edition was in progress at the time of Kaye's death. His edition of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees (1924) has a three-fold importance. It rescues from comparative obscurity one of the most interesting and significant thinkers of the eighteenth century, elucidates his philosophy, and traces both the roots of that philosophy and its subsequent influence. At the same time Kaye's introduction and notes, which stand as a model of scholarly method, provide the best existing account of a hitherto neglected current of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, to which he gave the name "anti-rationalism. " Kaye's residuary legatee presented to Northwestern University Kaye's fine collection of books dealing with deistic philosophy, and to Yale University a large part of his collection of drawings and etchings.

Achievements

• Kaye achieved an international reputation for sound and brilliant scholarship. Two of his publications were of special importance: "A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620-1800" (1927), one of the most valuable existing tools of scholarship in the period with which it dealt; and "Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees" (1924).

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620-1800

    (In this very practical aid to the student of the intellec...)

  • The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, Volume One

    ( Mandeville is the wittiest and shrewdest philosopher ev...)

  • The Writings of Bernard Mandeville A Bibliographical Survey Vol: 20 1921 Hardcover

    (Lang:- eng, Vol:- Volume 20, Pages 53. Reprinted in 2016 ...)

Membership

Kaye was a member of the Commission on Literary History of the International Historical Congress, and a member of the Authors' Club of London.

Connections

Kaye was unmarried.

Father:

Julius Gustav Kugelman

Mother:

Carrie Stern Kugelman