The Black President, and Other Plays (1965) 5 Plays 5 (1967) Lovecraft's Follies (1971) James Erwin Schevill (June 10, 1920 – January 30, 2009) was an American poet, critic, playwright and professor at San Francisco State University and Brown University, and the recipient of Guggenheim and Ford Foundation fellowships.
[clarification needed] He was visiting Freiburg, Germany, in 1938 when the Kristallnacht riots occurred, and the experience led him into writing and poetry.
He was influenced by his father, Rudolph Schevill, who created and chaired the department of romance languages at UC Berkeley, and created the West Coast committee in defense of the Spanish republic at the request of his friends Pablo Casals and Fernando de los Rios.
His mother Margaret Schevill, was an artist, a scholar of Navaho culture and mythology, and a follower of Carl Jung.
[citation needed] In a 1950 letter to Robert Sproul, the president of the University of California, he refused to sign a loyalty oath, at the time a prerequisite to becoming an instructor at the UC Berkeley.