Death of a Rebel

The Charlie Fenton Story

By (author) Scott Donaldson

Not available to order

Publication date:

01 November 2011

Length of book:

198 pages

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611474947

Death of a Rebel tells the story of Charles Andrews Fenton (1919-1960), a charismatic
teacher, scholar, and writer who took his own life by jumping from the top of the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham, North Carolina. At the time he was apparently at the peak of his career. He had written excellent books on Hemingway and Stephen Vincent Benét, had three other books in press, and was working on a new version of his novel about World War II (a 1945 account won the Doubleday Twentieth Century Fox award). He had earned Guggenheim and ACLS grants. Students flocked to his courses. He was widely regarded as the most popular professor at Duke.

Charlie Fenton’s story is a compelling one, and takes on further meaning in the context of the times. An individualist during the notoriously conformist 1950s, he swam against the current, defying authority and openly inviting controversy. This jaunty refusal to accept received wisdom made him an appealing figure to many of his students and colleagues. But it was a dangerous stance that did not sit well with his superiors, and it cost him when his fortunes took a turn for the worse in the spring and summer of 1960.

Love and war had a lot to do with his suicide as well. Charlie Fenton, who had come down to Duke from Yale two years earlier with a promotion to full professor, fell in love with one of his graduate students. His wife, outraged, left and took their son Andy with her. The scandal left him alone and a social pariah around campus. Then he suffered one of his bouts of depression. Usually these periods were triggered by trauma, most of it derived from his service as a tail gunner with the RAF bomber command in the summer and fall of 1942. In the past he’d always been able to shake free of his despondency. This time he was overcome by psychological pain deriving from loss: of wife and family, of public admiration, of companionship, and worst of all, of self-regard.

The book recounts Fenton’s last days in vivid detail. In writing it, Donaldson had the assistance of family members, of his devoted students, and even – at a painful distance – of the woman he fell in love with fifty years ago. They all share an abiding sense of what might have been, and a deep regret that he could not go on to inspire the uncounted students who would never get to know and admire and learn from him.
Bringing to the narrative of Fenton’s life and career the same effective blend of indefatigable archival skills and the gift of telling a compelling story in an engaging manner that he has displayed in his earlier work.

By combing through the university’s teaching evaluations and conducting interviews with many of Fenton’s students, Donaldson has amassed a great deal of eloquent and specific testimony to Fenton’s skill and popularity in the classroom

What is best about Death of a Rebel is that it gives us, convincingly and in depth, all the available, mostly first-hand, evidence we need to determine an answer while at the same time permitting the reader to draw his own conclusions. That this conclusion, whatever it may be, will be securely based on reliable evidence clearly and objectively presented, is the greatest tribute one can pay to this fine biography. In the end, while Charlie Fenton’s life was extraordinary in many respects, Donaldson’s book makes clear that we definitively assess and simplify any life at our peril