Wallace Fowlie was an American writer and professor of literature. He was the James B. Duke Professor of French Literature at Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

 from 1964. Known for his translations of the poet Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...

 and his critical studies of French poetry and drama, he also wrote about rock-poet Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison

James Douglas "Jim" Morrison was an American musician, singer, and poet, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors...

. Perhaps his most enduring legacy, however, is the product of six decades of teaching at universities in the United States, including Yale, Bennington, Holy Cross, U. Colorado-Boulder, and Duke. Devoted to teaching, particularly undergraduate courses in French, Italian, and modernist literature, Fowlie influenced several generations of American college students.

Fowlie received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died April 26, 1922...

 fellowship in 1947.

Fowlie corresponded with literary figures such as Henry Miller

Henry Miller

Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...

, René Char

René Char

René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...

, Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...

, André Gide

André Gide

André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...

, Alexis Léger

Saint-John Perse

Saint-John Perse was a French poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was also a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the USA until 1967.-Biography:Alexis Leger was...

 (Saint-John Perse

Saint-John Perse

Saint-John Perse was a French poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was also a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the USA until 1967.-Biography:Alexis Leger was...

), Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...

, and Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...

. His translations of Rimbaud were appreciated by a younger generation that included Jim Morrison and Patti Smith

Patti Smith

Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses....

. In 1990, Fowlie consulted with director Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone

William Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Stone became well known in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, for which he had previously participated as an infantry soldier. His work frequently focuses on...

 on the film The Doors

The Doors (film)

The Doors is a 1991 biopic about the 1960s-1970s rock band of the same name which emphasizes the life of its lead singer, Jim Morrison. It was directed by Oliver Stone, and stars Val Kilmer as Morrison, Meg Ryan as Pamela Courson , Kyle MacLachlan as Ray Manzarek, Frank Whaley as Robby Krieger,...

.

Works

• Age of Surrealism (1950)
• André Gide: His Life and Art (1965)
• Aubade: A Teacher's Notebook (1983) ISBN 0822305666
• Characters from Proust: Poems (1983) ISBN 080711071X
• Claudel (Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought) (1957)
• Climate of Violence: The French Literary Tradition from Baudelaire to the Present (1967)
• Clowns And Angels: Studies In Modern French Literature (1943)
• The Clown's Grail: A Study of Love in Its Literary Expression (1947)
• De Villon à Péguy (Editions de l'Arbre, Montreal, 1944)
• Dionysus in Paris: A Guide to Contemporary French Theater (1960)
• Ernest Psichari (Ernest Green & Co., New York, Toronto, 1939)
• From Chartered Land (William R Scott, New York, 1938)
• Jean Cocteau: The History of a Poet's Age (1966)
• Journal of Rehearsals: A Memoir (1997) ISBN 0822319454
• Intervalles (A. Magne, Paris, 1939, published under pen name Michel Wallace)
• La Pureté dans l'Art (Editions de l'Arbre, Montreal, 1941)
• Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie (1975)
• Mallarmé (Dennis Dobson, London; University of Chicago, Chicago, 1953)
• Matines et Vers (Paris, 1936; published under pen name Michel Wallace)
• Memory: A Fourth Memoir (1990) ISBN 0822310457
• Poem and Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism (1990) ISBN 027100696X
• A Reading of Dante's Inferno (1981) ISBN 0226258882
• Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters (1966) ISBN 0226719731. (Revised, 2005, ISBN 0226719774)
• Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet (1994) ISBN 0-8223-1442-8
• Rimbaud's Illuminations, A Study in Angelism (1953)
• Rimbaud, the Myth of Childhood (1946)
• Sites: A Third Memoir (1986) ISBN 0822307006
• Stendahl (1969)
• Charles Baudelaire Selected Poems from "Flowers of Evil" (1963) ISBN 0-486-28450-6

External Resources

• Wallace Fowlie obituary, New York Times
• Wallace Fowlie obituary, Duke News
• "Obituary: Professor Wallace Fowlie," The Independent
• "A Catholic Presence: Duke's Wallace Fowlie" by Stephen Martin
• Inventory of the Wallace Fowlie Papers, 1939-1996 and undated
• Wallace Fowlie on Andre Gide's L'Immoraliste
• "the Ubu of 1960," blog post