Frederic Will

The American poet/novelist/critic/translator Frederic Will was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1928. His parents, Samuel and Constance, moved the family to the Midwest in 1930; Will's father was for the next 25 years a professor of French at the University of Illinois and at Indiana University. His mother was a bilingual (English/French) housewife. The house in which he was brought up was lined with bookshelves of French literary classics–Montaigne and Rabelais featured, in leather bindings cut for them on the Left Bank. Will was raised on the campus of the University of Illinois, where—except during two years of asthma recovery in Arizona—he remained until going to Phillips Andover for his senior year of high school. His subsequent education was at Harvard (1946), Laval University in Quebec, and at Indiana University (B.A. in Classics, 1949), and Yale University (PhD Comparative Literature, 1954). Laval, with its pre-modern Thomist atmosphere, was the deepest of these forays into learning from others.