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The Most Ambitious Diary in History | The New Yorker

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Claude Fredericks, a Bennington classics professor, knew Anaïs Nin and James Merrill, and taught Donna Tartt. He kept a journal for eight decades, and persuaded many in his orbit that he was writing a titanic masterpiece. Did he?

Save this story Save this story The most prophetic literary criticism that I’ve read in recent years is a twenty-four-page chapbook published by an obscure private foundation in Vermont. The author is Claude Fredericks, a printer, playwright, amateur poet, and classics professor, who died in 2013. He is largely unknown outside a small circle of former students and colleagues at Bennington College—unknown, at least, by his own name. But readers of Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel, “ The Secret History ,” will have a sense of Fredericks through his fictionalized alter ego, Julian Morrow, a magnetic clas

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