Michael Fraenkel (1896-1957) was born in Kopul, Lithuania, and immigrated with his parents to New York City in 1903. After graduation from the City College of New York, he entered the book trade, selling encyclopedias and remaindered books. By 1926 he had attained enough financial security to go to Paris and write. During the next twelve years he spent considerable time in Paris, where his circle of friends included Henry Miller, Walter Lowenfels, Anais Nin, and Alfred Perles.

Although he and Walter Lowenfels met in 1928, they did not become close friends until 1929. By this time Fraenkel had written a draft of Werther's Younger Brother (1930), the first formulation of his ideas about death, and Lowenfels has completed USA with Music (1930), a play inspired by the killing of several striking miners in Herrin, Illinois. Both men wanted to see their books in print and agreed to form their own publishing company, Carrefour. Their first publication, Anonymous: the Need for Anonymity (1930), was a joint manifesto that grew out of their discussions about literature and the role of the writer. They believed that economic competition has separated man from the spirituality of the natural world. Anonymous publication would allow the writer to unite his "creative consciousness into the total creative consciousness of the world," to become one with all the writers who had ever tried to restore the ties between man and the universe.

Fraenkel's first book was Werther's Younger Brother, published in 1930 in an edition of 400 copies under the Carrefour imprint. It is a novel of a young man's discovery of his inner death. Fraenkel has developed his concept of death after reading Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1916 as a college freshman. Fraenkel had fallen calamitously in love with his elder brother's sweetheart, and even twenty years later insisted to Anais Nin that this had been the transforming pain of his existence. In general the book was ignored by American critics. Werther's Younger Brother and Lowenfel's USA with Music were both published anonymously in keeping with the author's manifesto. Their ideas attracted the praise and interest of a number of writers, but Carrefour received no manuscripts from these admirers. The practice of anonymity was dropped when in 1932 Lowenfels sued George S. Kaufman and George Gershwin, charging that they had plagiarized the plot of USA with Music for their play Of Thee I Sing.

In 1931 Henry Miller moved into Fraenkel's apartment at 18, Villa Seurat for about a month. Lowenfels had introduced the two men, and all three writers shared the belief that the West was dead. They formed a "school of death" in Paris that endured most of the thirties. In Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) the character of Boris is based upon Fraenkel. By the end of 1932 Fraenkel has nearly exhausted the money he had brought to Paris. Perceiving an untapped market for books, he went to the Philippines, where he worked at book selling until 1935, when he returned to Paris.

In 1936 he published Death in a Room, Poems 1927-1930, fifteen poems expressing his death theme poetically. Several of these poems had already appeared in transition during 1928 and 1929. His other book of 1936 was Bastard Death, The Autobiography of an Idea. Fraenkel addresses the book's introduction to Henry Miller, explaining that his concept of symbolic death is equivalent to the rebirth of a "new self which is dead, dead, of course, in life, which is bastard death, or, if you like, alive in death which is a bastard life."

In 1935 Fraenkel, Miller, and Alfred Perles began a correspondence about death. Miller suggested that they could write a 1000 page book that would be the "longest funeral sermon in history." After Perles complained that "death" was too abstract a topic, Miller suggested that they could examine the subject more concretely by discussing Shakespeare's Hamlet. Perles dropped out of the exchange of letters after a month, but Fraenkel and Miller corresponded until November 1938. The result of their exchange was Hamlet, two volumes of letters published in 1939 and 1941.

Fraenkel's first book published by a press other than his own, Death Is Not Enough, Essays in Active Negation, appeared in London in 1939. A series of essays on what Fraenkel called various aspects of "the psychic malaise of our time," some were written as early as 1932, but the book is unified by the essays' stress upon the dominance of a universal will. Fraenkel left France in 1939 and published the first volume of Hamlet in Puerto Rico that same year. The second volume was published in 1941 from New York. He stayed in Mexico during World War II, keeping a journal that was published in part of Land of the Quetzal (1946) and The Day Face and The Night Face (1947). Two more excerpts for his journals appeared in the first issue of Death (Summer 1946), a literary quarterly dedicated to Fraenkel and edited by Harry Herschkowitz. The same issue also republished Fraenkel and Lowenfels's Anonymous: the Need for Anonymity. In 1947 Fraenkel's essay on Henry Miller, "The Genesis of the Tropic of Cancer," appeared in The Happy Rock, a collection of essays about Miller edited by Bern Porter. Fraenkel died in 1957.

Excepts from Howard McCord, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 4: American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939, pp. 167-169.