Frederick J. Pohl (AC 1911) Papers

Novelist, playwright, teacher and historian/archaeologist Frederick Julius Pohl was born in 1889 in Durham, N.Y. Although he was a teacher for much of his professional career, he is known as a writer of dramatic works, numerous historical studies on the Viking exploration of North America and two books on William Shakespeare. Pohl graduated from Amherst College in 1911 and earned a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University in 1914. He taught at Ohio Wesleyan University (1911-1914) and the State College of Delaware (1915-1917) before taking a position as a teacher at Boys High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he worked from 1917 to 1951. Pohl served in the U.S. Army during World War I, 1918-1919.

Pohl’s published plays include When Things Were New: 9 Plays (1920-1926) and Brittle Heaven (1935), which was based on ideas presented in his first wife’s biography of Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson: The Human Background to Her Poetry, 1930). Brittle Heaven was produced on Broadway. Among his works on ancient trans-Atlantic voyages of discovery were Amerigo Vespucci, Pilot Major (1944), The Lost Discovery (1952), The Vikings on Cape Cod (1957), Atlantic Crossings Before Columbus (1961), The Viking Explorers (1966), Prince Henry Sinclair, His Expedition to the New World in 1398 (1986) and The Viking Settlements of North America (1972). In his book The New Columbus (1986), Pohl asserted that Christopher Columbus was half-Jewish and was born in Spain. Pohl also wrote William Shakespeare: A Biography which was published in 1983.

In 1926 Pohl married Josephine Pollitt; after her death in 1978, he married Loretta Baker in 1980 and moved to Westfield, Mass. Pohl and his wives traveled extensively after he retired from teaching. Frederick J. Pohl died in Westfield, Mass. in 1991 at the age of 101.