One of the most influential literary theorists of the twentieth century, Northrop Frye was the founder of archetypal criticism. In his most well-known work, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), he rejected earlier formalist and historicist theories in the study of literature. In this work he outlined and described the structures through which the whole of Western literature could be ordered by means of a rigorous schematization based on theories of literary modes, symbols, myths, and genres. He later used this critical method in two books on the Bible and literature, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982) and Words with Power: Being a Second Study of "the Bible and Literature" (1990). Frye was also an astute commentator on Canadian culture, especially the years prior to 1970 when Canadian arts were in a rapid stage of development.

The son of Herman Edward and Catherine Maud Howard Frye, Herman Northrop Frye was...