Negus, Ken

Negus, Ken

Ken Negus was born on December 23, 1927, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He attended the local public schools there, then attended Princeton University, from which he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph. D. degrees. He served in the U.S. Army (interrupting his undergraduate years) from 1946 to 1950, mostly in the Signal Corps and in the Army of Occupation in Germany and Austria. In 1954 he received a Fulbright grant for one year of study in Germany, where he attended Tuebingen University and did research for his Ph. D. dissertation. He then served in the German departments of Northwestern, Harvard, Princeton, and Rutgers. From time to time at Rutgers, he served temporarily as department chairman and graduate director of German, but he was mainly a teacher and researcher in German literature of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. His main publications are E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Other World (1965) and Grimmelshausen (1972); as well as numerous articles and book reviews on German literature. He retired from Rutgers in 1986 as full professor. Since the beginning of his career as a teacher of literature, he has been translating German poetry into English, and writing his own in both languages. He has self-published several small volumes of poetry, much of which is astrological.

During the sixties, Negus became interested in astrology, as a result of his research on Grimmelshausen, a seventeenth-century German novelist who was also an astrologer and incorporated much astrological symbolism into his writings. Eventually this sideline of astrology became a major interest in itself. In 1972 he helped to found the Astrological Society of Princeton, NJ, Inc., which at times has grown to a membership of over 100. It is one of the most active astrological organizations in the area, with regular meetings, a faculty that teaches on all levels, a referral service for consulting astrologers, a lending library for members, and a journal. Meanwhile Negus has been practicing astrology extensively, writing about it, delivering lectures on it, and filling various offices in several other astrological organizations. Since his retirement from his university career, astrology has become his main activity.

His publications include writings on astrology and literature, harmonics, Chiron, astrology at the university, the validation of astrology, Johannes Kepler, the Cyclic Index, five volumes of his own astrological and esoteric poetry, and numerous translations of poetry and astrological texts. He maintains a regular practice as an astrologer, specializing in rectification; and as a teacher in the faculty of the Astrological Society of Princeton, NJ. He and his wife, Joan, were married in 1952, and remained so until her death in 1997. They have three children and seven grandchildren.