He was raised in central Africa, where his parents, the anthropologists Victor W. and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research.He graduated from the University of Oxford with a B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1977.
He taught at the University of Exeter, University of California at Santa Barbara, and Kenyon College. From 1978-82 he was editor of The Kenyon Review.He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas.
He has been married since 1966 to Mei Lin Turner (née Chang, a literary periodical editor), and has two sons.
Between Two Lives (Wesleyan University Press, 1972: poetry)
Counter-Terra (Christopher’s Books, 1978: poetry)
The Garden (Ptyx Press, 1985: poetry)
The New World (Princeton University Press, 1985: an epic poem)
Genesis (Saybrook Publishing Co./Norton, 1988: an epic poem)
April Wind (University Press of Virginia, 1992; poetry)
On the Field of Life, on the Battlefield of Truth (Pivot Press, 2004: poetry)
Në Shpellën e Platonit (”In Plato’s Cave”, full-length collection of poems by Frederick Turner translated into Albanian by Gjekë Marinaj, Marinaj Publishing, Dallas, Frankfurt, Tirana, 2006)
The Prayers of Dallas (poetry; Turning Point Press, Cincinnati, Ohio 2006)
Novels
A Double Shadow (Putnam’s/Berkley, 1978: a science fiction novel)
Criticism
Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971: criticism)
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (London University Press, 1974: edition with notes and introduction)
(Reprinted in paperback by University Press of Virginia, 1992)
Tempest, Flute, and Oz: Essays on the Future (Persea Books, 1992)
Beauty: The Value of Values (University Press of Virginia, 1992)
(The Free Press, 1995)
The Ballad of the Good Cowboy (The Maverick Press, 1997)
Natural Religion (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, and London, 2006)
Frederick Hart: The Complete Works: Essays by Donald Kuspit and Frederick Turner. Butler Books, Louisville, 2007.
In describing the work of Frederick Turner, it may help to borrow a line from the introduction to his 1985 book, Natural Classicism: "That whole of which I speak is, like a solid as opposed to a plane or a curve, not easily scanned, expounded, or even described by a single line of argument." He has been called a universal scholar-a rare find in a world of over-specialization-whose work transects and borrows from several rather disparate fields. Turner is as comfortable trafficking in the language of theoretical physics and evolutionary biology as he is discussing the sonnet form.
Turner, a REASON contributing editor and a professor of arts and humanities at University of Texas at Dallas, senses that the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of Shakespeare's view of commercial activity. The collapse of communism has discredited Marxist theory, and the worldwide success of market reforms has forced even professors of economics to take a fresh look at how capitalism works. Turner sees that the virtue of the free market goes beyond merely economic considerations; it encompasses a whole range of ethical and political goods.
