Yale Class of '52
Artists & Authors

Gordon Rogoff
Yale 1952

Theater Is Not Safe (1987 Northwestern University Press)
Vanishing Acts (2000 Yale University Press)

Gordon was Associate Dean of the Yale School of Drama in the sixties, then head of directing, and during the past 16 years was a teacher of critical writing and dramatic literature. “If it's possible to improvise a life, than that is what I have done as part-time actor, director, teacher, adaptor, and-foremost perhaps-critic.”

His books are a summation of his role as both participant and witness to an art form always perceived as “hanging on for dear life, never more so than in the waning years of that catastrophic century so recently behind us.” The best way to sum up the contents of his books is that they represent for him occasional victories in the struggle to master the short form.

"If I am an accidental writer, I am also a real one at last, preferring the shaping of phrases, the discovery of thought, the delight in pouncing upon the right word more than anything else I have ever done. Real criticism is an act of writing, an effort to meet artists on their terms.

Where Theater Is Not Safe follows a chronology, Vanishing Acts presents thematic sections in Acting and Directing, Playwriting, Operas, and Musicals, merging together, finally, as narrative of 'achievement and loss'. Some of the work is new, and what was old was often reshaped at last into something new again, if only because the story emerging was one I hadn't known was there."

John L. Field Yale 1952

"My years at Yale launched me on a very satisfying career as an architect with an enduring foundation of inspiration discovered in Vince Scully's courses. But it was Yale's distribution of study requirements that took me into areas of thought that have greatly enriched my life ever since.

In addition to designing a variety of buildings, I have been a filmmaker of two documentaries for Public Television, written articles and been on the editorial boards of two architectural magazines. I continue to write about architecture and planning as well as try my hand at writing fiction; the latter done as one climbs Everest, just because its there."

Center Court Paseo Nuevo, Santa Barbara

Edwin Sauter, Jr.
Yale 1952
M.A. University of Louisville 1956
Ph.D. Columbia Pacific University 1991

A Crown for Thomas Peters (1964 Ives Washburn, Inc) This biographical novel is based on the life of a young Negro who became a passionate leader of his people in their struggle for freedom because he knew so well what bondage meant. The son of an African chieftain, he was captured by the British in the early eighteenth century, became the property of a vindictive sea captain, and was sold into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina. From that point on, he tried desperately to free himself, his beloved wife Mary, and as many of his people as he could until he finally achieved his dream of returning to Sierra Leone as their leader.

Thomas Peters helped to turn the former slave trading port of Sierra Leone into Freetown, a purchased legal grant of land for free Negro settlers. The crown of the title refers to the gold one used in the ceremony surrounding Tom's installation as Freetown's first mayor in 1761. The book offers criticism and admiration to those white men who deserved blame or praise for their parts in the procuring of slaves or in the abolition of the traffic in Great Britain and the United States.