In the late 1940s Fredericks founded Banyan Press, which for decades issued hand-set limited editions by writers such as Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, and James Merrill.
The first several thousand pages of The Journal of Claude Fredericks, a personal diary that is unprecedented in its length, continuity, detail, and candor, has been published in several volumes.
His mother took him to weekly Sunday afternoon picture shows and he listened to broadcasts of plays and symphony concerts on the radio.
In 1941, at seventeen, he entered Harvard College, where he studied Greek with John Huston Finley Jr., Sanskrit with Walter Eugene Clark, and Oriental Art with Langdon Warner.
This means, of course, conceiving them anew in the language of one’s own time—but with neither eccentricity, self-expressiveness, nor a radical break with whatever subtle tradition is present—not designing them, but letting their beauty arise inevitably and uniquely from the flawless skill of true craftsmanship, from the very making of the book itself.The Banyan Press catalog is far-ranging and consists largely of unpublished works, printed by hand in limited editions, by well-known writers such as Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Richard Eberhart, Stephen Spender, Osbert Sitwell, André Gide, Florine Stettheimer, James Merrill, Robert Duncan, John Berryman, Thomas Merton, Bernard Malamud, Charles Simic, as well as works by John Donne, Thomas Traherne, William Blake, Meister Eckhart, Francis of Assisi, and other writers from earlier centuries.
Complete runs are at the Fales Library at New York University and also at the Research Institute of the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
"[citation needed] After moving to a beautiful Greek Revival farmhouse in Pawlet, Vermont, in 1948[1] Fredericks began to write plays, more than a dozen over the next thirty years.
In 1965, A Summer Ghost appeared in the first volume of New American Plays, edited by Robert Corrigan, and The Bennington Review included On Circe’s Island in its issue for the winter of 1969.
The Idiot King was not published until 2012, when it appeared alongside A Summer Ghost and On Circe’s Island in a volume entitled Three Plays.
[3] In 1962, writing in the New York Times, Arthur Gelb panned a production of On Circe's Island and The Summer Ghost, presented together under the title Charlatans: "the two plays talk themselves into a kind of numbing dullness."
"[4] In 1961 Fredericks began to teach at Bennington College,[5] famous for the non-traditional, even radical, liberal-arts education it offered its students.
Fredericks also taught students in tutorials usually held in his second-floor corner office in Commons Building at Bennington.
[7] Other students included: novelist Bret Easton Ellis, poets Anne Waldman and Kathleen Norris, Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of The New Criterion, Thomas Matthews, editor of The Wine Spectator, activist Andrea Dworkin, and philanthropist Yasmin Aga Khan.
[citation needed] Colleagues of Fredericks at Bennington included: novelists Bernard Malamud, Arturo Vivante, and Shirley Jackson, poet Howard Nemerov, literary critics Stanley Edgar Hyman, Kenneth Burke, and Camille Paglia, art critic Lawrence Alloway, composers Marc Blitzstein, Henry Brant, and Peter Golub, painters Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, and sculptor Anthony Caro.
When he changed his mind years later, Giroux thought it too late to interest the reading public in figures no longer current: "The moment's passed.