Steven Frye, PHD

BIOGRAPHY

Steven Frye is Professor of English and former Chair of the English Department at CSUB. He teaches courses across the breadth of American literature with specializations in American Romanticism, Naturalism, Modernism, and the Literature of the American West. He also teaches courses on the novel, modern drama, literary criticism, and advanced writing.

Steven Frye’s research interests include the romance tradition of the nineteenth century, including such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and especially Herman Melville. That same tradition finds its greatest contemporary expression in the novels of Cormac McCarthy and the Literature of the American West. From 2010 to 2022, he served as President of the Cormac McCarthy Society and is currently on the Executive Board.

Frye has published four book-length studies: Understanding Cormac McCarthy (University of South Carolina Press), Understanding Larry McMurtry (University of South Carolina Press) Unguessed Kinships: Naturalism and the Geography of Hope in Cormac McCarthy (University of Alabama Press), and Historiography and Narrative Design in the American Romance: A Study of Four Authors (Edwin Mellen Press). He has also edited and contributed to three collections of essays by Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West, and Cormac McCarthy in Context as well as two edited collections on the work of Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Insights: The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Critical Insights: The Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. He has published essays on Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, Herman Melville, Frank Norris, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Cormac McCarthy in such journals as American Studies, The Centennial Review, The Southern Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Studies in American Naturalism, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, American Literary Realism, and Modern Fiction Studies. In addition, he has published essays on Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and the films of the the New Hollywood Cinema of the 1970’s. He is on the editorial advisory board of Religion and Literature (University of Notre Dame), The Cormac McCarthy Journal (Pennsylvania State University Press), and Studies in American Naturalism (University of Nebraska Press).

With Eric Carl Link, he is co-creator and co-editor of the composition reader Crosscurrents: Reading Across the Disciplines, published by Pearson/Longman Education.

He is also author of the novel Dogwood Crossing.

Professor Frye has served as a Visiting Professor of Graduate Studies at Bard College and the University of Warsaw, Poland. He has delivered invited guest lectures at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington; The University of Reykjavik, Iceland; University College, Cork, Ireland; The University of Warsaw, Poland; Jagellonian University, Krakow, Poland, The University of Gdansk, Poland. He has been a guest on several podcasts on the literature of the American West and the fiction of Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.

Professor Frye was the recipient of the 2019 California State University, Bakersfield Award for Outstanding Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity.