Reprint of 1st American Edition Swallow List of Subscibers laid in

James Schevill, 1920-2009
By Dorothy Bryant Special to the Planet

Jim Schevill—poet, playwright (stage and radio), biographer, novelist, critic, editor, teacher, producer, administrator, and loyal friend to many—was born in Berkeley.

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.[1] He wrote more than 10 volumes of poetry, 30 plays, many essays, a novel, and biographies of Bern Porter and Sherwood Anderson.[2] His plays include Lovecraft's Follies (1971) based on the life and work of Providence horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

He was visiting Freiburg, Germany in 1938 when the Kristallnacht riots occurred, and the experience led him into writing and poetry.[2]


Jim often said he found his vocation at age 17, in Freiburg, Germany, where he happened to be on “Kristallnacht,” the infamous riots against Jews, which ushered in the Holocaust. The following morning, sick with horror and disgust, he wrote his first poem. He always called it a “bad poem,” but it set the direction of his concerns, the lifelong inspiration for his work—addressing the cruelties of power, the suffering of victims, and the necessity to resist evil.

While at Brown he also wrote his one novel The Arena of Ants (1976) inspired by a horrifically surreal period during his WWII army service. At age 24, Jim was one of several officers assigned to “re-education and de-nazification” at a German POW camp in Colorado. Shown films of Nazi atrocities, some German prisoners vomited, yet remained beyond reach. What gradually emerged was that the fanatic and well-organized Nazi prisoners terrorized and dominated the ordinary German prisoners, wielding more power over the camp than their ignorant captors.