About: Thomas Parkinson

Thomas F. Parkinson (1920–1992) Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, was a poet in his own right; an expert on the poetry of W. B. Yeats; and one of the first academic authorities to write about the Beat poets and novelists of San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s. A deeply thoughtful man of great integrity, he was a quiet political activist for much of his life, and survived a murder attempt in 1961 by a deranged former student who sought to "get someone who was associated with Communism." Though Parkinson survived being shot in the face (and bore the scars of the assault for the rest of his life), the teaching assistant who was with him at the time was killed. Thomas Parkinson died of an apparent heart attack in 1992, at age 72, after a long illness.