Terrence des Pres

(1939 - 1987)

Terrence Des Pres wrote in the introduction to The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, “It turns out that survival is an experience with a definite structure, neither random nor regressive nor amoral. The aim of this book has been to make that structure visible.” Born in Effingham, Illinois, in 1939, Des Pres received his MA and PhD from Washington University in the 1960s and served as a professor of English at Colgate University—where he taught a course called “Literature of the Holocaust”—from 1973 until his death in 1987.