Morton Herbert Fried (March 21, 1923 in Bronx, New York - December 17, 1986 in Leonia, New Jersey)¹, was a distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City from 1950 until his death in 1986, and a prominent anthropologist of the twentieth century. He made considerable contributions to the fields of social and political theory.

Fried attended Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New York. At City College, he was originally an English major but changed to anthropology. He and his Townsend Harris/CCNY friends Richard F. Shepard and Irving Zupnick founded the Mundial Upheaval Society while still in college.^{citation needed2}

Fried served in the U.S. Army during World War II³, after one year of graduate work in anthropology at Columbia. In the Army, he was sent to a Chinese language school and he went on to specialize in the anthropology of China, earning his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1950.¹ He did fieldwork in the late 1940s in Anwei Province, China, and wrote a book entitled, The Fabric of Chinese Society (1953).¹

He married Martha Nemes, and the couple had two children, Nancy Eileen Foster and Elman Steven Fried.¹

Select bibliography

• Fried, Morton H. 1959. Readings in anthropology. New York: Crowell.
• Fried, Morton H. 1960. On the evolution of social stratificiation and the state. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
• Fried, Morton. 1965. "A Four Letter Word that Hurts." SATURDAY REVIEW, October 2,. 1965
• Fried, Morton H. 1967. The evolution of political society an essay in political anthropology. Random House studies in anthropology, AS 7. New York: Random House.
• American Anthropological Association, Morton H. Fried, Marvin Harris, and Robert Francis Murphy. 1968. War: the anthropology of armed conflict and aggression. Garden City, N.Y.: Published for the American Museum of Natural History [by] the Natural History Press.
• Fried, Morton H. 1969. Fabric of Chinese society; a study of the social life of a Chinese county seat. New York: Octagon Books.
• Fried, Morton H. 1975. The notion of tribe. Menlo Park, Calif: Cummings Pub. Co.
• Fried, Martha Nemes, and Morton H. Fried. 1980. Transitions: four rituals in eight cultures. New York: Norton.
• Fried, Morton H. 1987. Reflections on Christianity in China. AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST 14:1, Frontiers of Christian Evangelism, (Feb., 1987): 94-106.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d} Morton Fried Obituary at Minnesota State University
2. ^ Personal papers
3. ^ U.S. World War II Army Enlistment Records, 1938-1946