B.A., M.A., and Ph. D. degrees. He served in the U.S. Army (interrupting his undergradu-
ate 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. disser-
tation. 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 translat-
ing German poetry into English, and writing his own in both languages. He has self-pub-
lished 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. Eventu-
ally 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 retire-
ment from his university career, astrology has become his main activity.
His publications include writings on astrology and literature, harmonics, Chi-
ron, astrology at the university, the validation of astrology, Johannes Kepler, the Cyclic
Index, five volumes of his own astrological and esoteric poetry, and numerous transla-
tions 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.NELSON, JOHN
John Nelson was an American radio engineer who specialized in the analysis of short-
wave radio propagation. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was an employee of RCA Commu-
nications and worked on the problem of how to predict fluctuations in the Earth’s mag-
netic field that disrupted radio communication. It was well known that these fluctua-
tions were affected by, among other things, sunspot activity. Using this clue as a starting
point, Nelson began investigating correlations between the heliocentric configurations
of the planets and radio wave disturbances. His findings were so remarkable that he was
eventually able to predict such disturbances with a better than 93 percent accuracy.
His discoveries verified certain elements of traditional astrology to a remarkable
extent. For instance, he found that when two or more planets either lined up with theNelson, John
[486] THEASTROLOGYBOOK