Frederick Campbell Crews (February 20, 1933 – June 21, 2024) was an American essayist and literary critic. Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, Crews was the author of numerous books, including The Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the Later Novels of Henry James (1957), E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (1962), and The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (1966), a discussion of the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He received popular attention for The Pooh Perplex (1963), a book of satirical essays parodying various schools of literary criticism. Initially a proponent of psychoanalytic literary criticism, Crews later rejected psychoanalysis, becoming a critic of Sigmund Freud and his scientific and ethical standards. Crews was a prominent participant in the "Freud wars" of the 1980s and 1990s, a debate over the reputation, scholarship, and impact on the 20th century of Freud, who founded psychoanalysis. In 2017, he published Freud: The Making of an Illusion.

Crews published a variety of skeptical and rationalist essays, including book reviews and commentary for The New York Review of Books, on a variety of topics including Freud and recovered memory therapy, some of which were published in The Memory Wars (1995). He also published successful handbooks for college writers, such as The Random House Handbook.

Crews was born in suburban Philadelphia on February 10, 1933. Both his parents were avid readers and were quite influential in his life, said Crews: "They had both been raised in considerable poverty, and books had been extremely important to them personally, in shaping them. My mother was very literary; my father was very scientific. I feel that I got a little something of both sides." In high school, Crews was co-captain of the tennis team, and for decades he remained an avid skier, hiker, swimmer, and runner. Crews lived in Berkeley with his wife, Elizabeth Crews, a photographer who was born and raised in Berkeley, California. They had two daughters and four grandchildren.

Crews died in Oakland, California on June 21, 2024, at the age of 91.

Crews completed his undergraduate education at Yale University in 1955. Though his degree was in English, Crews entered the Directed Studies program during his first two years at Yale, which he describes as his greatest experience because the program was taught by a coordinated faculty and required students to distribute their courses among sciences, social sciences, literature, and philosophy. He received his PhD in literature from Princeton University in 1958. Crews cited Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hawthorne, and Freud as major influences during his time at Princeton.

In 1958, Crews joined the UC Berkeley English Department, where he taught for 36 years before retiring as its chair in 1994. He was a Fulbright scholar with a lectureship at University of Turin in Italy for the 1961–1962 academic year.

Crews was an anti-war activist from 1965 to about 1970 and advocated draft resistance as co-chair of Berkeley's Faculty Peace Committee. Though he shared the widespread assumption during the mid-1960s that psychoanalytic theory was a valid account of human motivation and was one of the first academics to apply that theory systematically to the study of literature, Crews gradually came to regard psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. This convinced him that his loyalty should not belong to any theory but rather to empirical standards and the skeptical point of view. Throughout his career, Crews brought his concern for rational discourse to the study of various issues, from the controversy over recovered memory, the credibility of the Rorschach test, and belief in alien abductions to Theosophy and "intelligent design." He also advocated for clear writing based on standards of sound argument and rhetorical effectiveness rather than adherence to rigid school-book rules. "What interests me is general rationality," said Crews in an interview:

General rationality requires us to observe the world carefully, to consider alternative hypotheses to our own hypotheses, to gather evidence in a responsible way, to answer objections. These are habits of mind that science shares with good history, good sociology, good political science, good economics, what have you. And I summarize all this in what I call the "empirical attitude." It's a combination of feeling responsible to the evidence that is available, feeling responsible to go out and find that evidence, including the evidence that is contrary to one's presumptions, and responsibility to be logical with one's self and others. And this is an ideal that is not so much individual as social. The rational attitude doesn't really work when simply applied to one's self. It is something that we owe to each other.