Frederick Wilcox Dupee (1904-1979) was a prominent American literary critic and scholar, known for his lucid and witty prose. The Columbia University English professor was among the founders of Partisan Review and a regular contributor to publications such as The New York Review of Books and The Nation, authored "The King of the Cats" & Other Remarks on Writers and Writing (1965) and the biography Henry James (1965), and edited The Question of Henry James (1945), Henry James: Autobiography (1956), and editions of Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, E. E. Cummings and Leon Trotsky.

An Illinois native and Yale graduate, Dupee belonged to the mid-century generation of New York left-wing intellectuals described by Nicholas Lemann as "The American Bloomsbury". For decades, Dupee had been a fixture of the New York literary scene, keeping friendships and correspondences with many of the period's cultural icons. His close friendship with Mary McCarthy was portrayed in an essay she contributed to The Company They Kept (2006).

Dupee started publishing literary reviews in the 1920s. During the 1930s he was a socialist organizer and literary editor for the New Masses. Dupee was hired by Columbia University as Assistant in English in 1940, and became assistant professor at Bard College in 1944. In 1947 he married Barbara ("Andy") Hughes, a recent Bard graduate; the two returned to New York within several years, when Dupee became a Columbia University professor. Dupee was appointed as full professor in 1957, despite never having obtained a graduate degree.

Dupee was an awarded and popular professor, known for his contemporary choices of readings and sometimes unorthodox style of teaching, as well as his support of students during the Columbia University protests of 1968 – documented in an essay he published in The New York Review of Books following the events ("my habitual detachment from campus politics had recently broken down as I saw the students growing more and more desperate," wrote Dupee). After retiring from Columbia in 1971, Dupee and his wife moved to Carmel, California. He maintained connections with West Coast academics and occasionally taught at Stanford. Dupee died in California in 1979, following a medication overdose.