Frederic Ewen was an author, educator, and champion of the individual's right to self-expression and intellectual freedom. A popular lecturer at Brooklyn College, where he was Assistant Professor of English Literature, he dedicated his final book to his former students, who for him had made "teaching a privilege and learning a joy." Dr. Ewen's political activism during the 1930s and thereafter led to his becoming a victim of the academic witch-hunts of the McCarthy Era, and his forced retirement from Brooklyn College in 1952.

Frederic Ewen was born on October 11, 1899, in Lembert, Austria, the son of Isaac and Helen (Kramer) Ewen. He was brought by his family to the United States in 1912 and became a naturalized citizen that same year. Ewen grew up in Brooklyn and then attended City College, where he graduated in 1921; he then attended Columbia University, where he received his M.A. degree in 1925 and completed his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature in 1932. He began his career as a teacher at City College, starting as an English instructor in 1923. In 1930 he began teaching English at Brooklyn College, and eventually attained the rank of assistant professor. An activist in many progressive causes in the 1930s, Ewen was in demand as a political speaker. On campus his political activities included serving as advisor to a student Marxist society, helping to organize support for the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War, and participating in work of the New York Teachers Union.

Established in 1940, and functioning mostly in 1941-42, the New York State Legislature's Joint Committee to Investigate Procedure and Methods of Allocating State Moneys for Public School Purposes and Subversive Activities, known as the Rapp-Coudert Committee, investigated allegations of subversive activities in the New York City's public schools and colleges. Along with seven other teachers from Brooklyn College, Dr. Ewen refused to testify before the Committee's representatives, calling the investigation an "attack on the things that the system stands for and had fought in the last 20 years to obtain." Although Dr. Ewen and other tenured Brooklyn College professors were spared the fate suffered by a group of their colleagues at City College who were investigated and dismissed (or pressured to resign) by the Board of Higher Education, Dr. Ewen and other progressive teachers at Brooklyn suffered professionally, and fell under suspicion again during the anti-subversive hysteria of the early 1950s.

In addition to his teaching, Dr. Ewen was a noted author. His first book, The Prestige of Schiller in England, was published in 1932; three years later his Bibliography of Eighteenth-Century English Literaturefollowed. Musical Vienna, which he co-wrote with his brother, was published in 1939 and The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heinewas published in 1948. In 1949 Ewen married Miriam Gideon, a composer.

In 1952 Ewen was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (known as the McCarran Committee), and he knew that non-cooperation would mean the loss of his job. Because of his long service he was eligible for early retirement, and he felt obliged to accept that alternative; his retirement took effect the day before his scheduled testimony. Appearing before the Committee's representatives, he stood on his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to testify. Dr. Ewen's wife, Miriam Gideon, a composer who also taught (in an untenured position) at Brooklyn College, lost her position as well, and in order to support his family he organized lectures and theatrical presentations in union halls, theaters and other venues in the 1950s and 1960s. Gathering a team of blacklisted actors who were in need of work, such as Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and John Randolph, Dr. Ewen created a novel form of public performance, in which he lectured on a particular author or literary/dramatic theme, and the actors read excerpts from the relevant works. Television adaptations by Ewen include "Two Jewish Stories" in 1966, "The Unknown Chekhov" in 1967, and Chekhov's "Ward Number 6" in 1968, all done for CBS.

In 1967, Citadel Press published Dr. Ewen's Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art, and His Times. Over the next 20 years, Professor Ewen worked on other publishing projects. The first volume of his projected trilogy on the literature and politics of the mid-nineteenth century, was published by Citadel in 1984 as Heroic Imagination: The Creative Genius of Europe from Waterloo to the Revolution of 1848.Ewen's introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Maxim Gorkyappeared in the month of his death, October 1988.