Frye, Northrop (1912-1991), was a Canadian literary and social critic. Frye's first book, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947), helped to unlock the mysteries of this English writer's imaginative universe. It also showed the important role that the human imagination plays in the creation of the world. From Blake, Frye also learned that all works of literature incorporated similar basic structures. He outlined these forms in Anatomy of Criticism (1957).