Thomas F. Parkinson (1920–1992) was an American poet and Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He specialized in the poetry of W. B. Yeats; and was one of the first academics to write about the Beat poets and novelists of San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s.
Parkinson was also a political activist for much of his life, and survived a murder attempt in 1961 by a 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 a heart attack in 1992, at age 72, after a long illness.
Parkinson's early life was affected by the Great Depression and the Second World War. Growing up in San Francisco as the son of a master-plumber union leader who was blacklisted during the general strike of the late 1930s,[1] Parkinson developed a respect for labor and a sensitivity to social injustice. He attended Lowell High School and a junior college.
When World War II began, Parkinson enlisted in the Army, but was eventually discharged due to his tall height. In the years that followed, Parkinson worked a variety of jobs, including as an insurance agent, a ship's outfitter, and a lumberjack. During this time, he continued to read widely and deeply. He eventually returned to the Bay Area to study at UC Berkeley, where he completed his bachelor's degree in three years.
While at Berkeley in the 1950s, Parkinson became involved in political activism. He helped found KPFA-radio Berkeley when it was a free-form West Coast anarchist collective. Parkinson made a number of public statements criticizing the lack of funding for student scholarships, including those for women students.
An article he published in the campus newspaper, The Daily Californian, sparked the murder attempt by a former student who claimed to have been commanded by God. Parkinson was severely injured in the attack—several of his vertebrae were fused and his face permanently damaged, and the teaching assistant who was with him at the time was killed.
After the murder attempt, Parkinson continued to promote liberal causes, served as campus Ombudsman, chaired the Berkeley chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and testified at the obscenity trial on behalf of Allen Ginsberg's Howl. He was instrumental in helping promote humanities study, teacher training, and extension courses for non-matriculated students during a period when the university was pressured to specialize its programs and become increasingly elite.
During this period, Parkinson's academic career began to flourish as he published two works: W. B. Yeats, Self-Critic (1961) and W. B. Yeats, The Later Poetry (1964), which established him as an authority on the Anglo-Irish poet.
Parkinson was also one of the first academic critics to promote the works of Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, as well as writers John Montague (poet) and Robert Duncan. He published his Casebook on the Beats in 1961.[2] He became part of the circle of writers, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, that helped evolve the San Francisco literary culture of the 1960s. Later volumes on Hart Crane and other poets won him acclaim. His last book, Poets, Poems, Movements (1987), is a collection of essays.
When Parkinson was an undergraduate at Cal, he won the twenty-sixth Emily Chamberlain Cook Prize in Poetry in 1945, for his poem "Letter to a Young Lady" which was published as a stapled booklet that year by The Circle.