H. Bruce Franklin

Howard Bruce Franklin (February 28, 1934 – May 19, 2024) was an American cultural historian and scholar. He was notable for receiving top awards for his lifetime scholarship in fields as diverse as American studies, science fiction, prison literature and marine ecology. He wrote or edited twenty books and three hundred professional articles and participated in making four films. His main areas of academic focus were science fiction, prison literature, environmentalism, the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and American cultural history. He was instrumental in helping to debunk false public speculation that Vietnam was continuing to hold prisoners of war. He helped to establish science fiction writing as a genre worthy of serious academic study. In 2008, the American Studies Association awarded him the Pearson-Bode Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies.

A critic of the Vietnam War, he was one of the founding members of the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, heading its Palo Alto chapter. After a split within the party, he became the leader of a new organization, Venceremos. Venceremos was a largely Chicano Third Worldist organization.

Franklin was fired from Stanford University in 1972 for allegedly inciting students to riot in connection with those activities. The termination brought nationwide attention to the issue of academic freedom. Franklin was arrested in December 1972 for harboring Ronald Beaty, a federal fugitive after being freed in October during a prison transfer in which one guard was killed and another wounded. Initially, Franklin was charged with murder, though the charges were later dropped.

Franklin became a tenured full professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University–Newark in 1975. He also held the John Cotton Dana endowed chair at the institution from 1987 until retiring in 2015. Thereafter, he retained the title of professor emeritus.