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Otto Friedrich

Born

Boston, The United States

Died

April 26, 1995

Website

http://www.ottofriedrich.com

Genre

History, Biography

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Otto Friedrich was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard, where his father was a political science professor. He took a while to find his literary stride. His career took him from the copy desk at Stars and Stripes to a top writing job at Time, with stops in between with the United Press in London and Paris and with The Daily News and Newsweek in New York.

But it was the seven years he spent with The Saturday Evening Post, including four as its last managing editor, that established Mr. Friedrich as a writer to be reckoned with.

When the venerable magazine folded in 1969, Mr. Friedrich, who had seen the end coming and kept meticulous notes, delineated its demise in a book, 'Decline and Fall," which was published by Harper & Row the next y
Otto Friedrich was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard, where his father was a political science professor. He took a while to find his literary stride. His career took him from the copy desk at Stars and Stripes to a top writing job at Time, with stops in between with the United Press in London and Paris and with The Daily News and Newsweek in New York.

But it was the seven years he spent with The Saturday Evening Post, including four as its last managing editor, that established Mr. Friedrich as a writer to be reckoned with.

When the venerable magazine folded in 1969, Mr. Friedrich, who had seen the end coming and kept meticulous notes, delineated its demise in a book, 'Decline and Fall," which was published by Harper & Row the next year. Widely hailed as both an engaging and definitive account of corporate myopia, the book, which won a George Polk Memorial Award, is still used as a textbook by both journalism and business schools, his daughter said.

From then on, Mr. Friedrich, who had tried his hand as a novelist in the 1950's and 60's and written a series of children's books with his wife, Priscilla Broughton, wrote nonfiction, turning out an average of one book every two years.

They include "Clover: A Love Story," a 1979 biography of Mrs. Henry Adams; "City of Nets: Hollywood in the 1940's" (1986); "Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations," (1989); "Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet," (1992), and "Blood and Iron," a study of the Von Moltke family of Germany that is being published this fall.

He wrote his books, as well as reams of freelance articles and book reviews, while holding down a full-time job with Time that required him to write in a distinct style far different from the one he used at home.

Mr. Friedrich, who joined Time as a senior editor in 1971 and retired in 1990 after a decade as a senior writer, wrote 40 major cover stories, the magazine said yesterday, as well as hundreds of shorter pieces, all of them produced on an old-fashioned Royal typewriter that he was given special dispensation to continue using long after the magazine converted to computers.

Mrs. Lucas, portraying her father as a New England moralist whose life and literary interests reflected his disenchantment with much of 20th-century culture, noted that his aptitude for anachronism did not end with typewriters. "We have five rotary telephones in this house," she said.

In addition to pursuing his eclectic interests into print, Mr. Friedrich also had a knack for turning his own life into art. When he tried to grow roses, the record of his failure became a book, "The Rose Garden" (1972). When relatives were stricken with schizophrenia, his frustration drove him to produce an exhaustive study of insanity, "Going Crazy" (1976).

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Otto Friedrich’s books

Average rating: 4.09 · 2,907 ratings · 384 reviews · 49 distinct works • Similar authors

	City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s 4.11 avg rating — 1,123 ratings — published 1986 — 30 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s 4.16 avg rating — 577 ratings — published 1972 — 23 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Kingdom of Auschwitz 4.26 avg rating — 349 ratings — published 1994 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet 4.10 avg rating — 213 ratings — published 1993 — 12 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations 4.04 avg rating — 157 ratings — published 1989 — 14 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The End of the World: A History 4.38 avg rating — 66 ratings — published 1982 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Blood and Iron: From Bismarck to Hitler the von Moltke Family's Impact on German History really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 45 ratings — published 1995 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Going crazy: An inquiry into madness in our time 4.21 avg rating — 34 ratings — published 1976 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Clover: The Tragic Love Story of Clover and Henry Adams and Their Brilliant Life in America's Gilded Age 3.75 avg rating — 32 ratings — published 1979 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Grave of Alice B. Toklas: And Other Reports from the Past 3.71 avg rating — 17 ratings — published 1989 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Otto Friedrich (?)

“Again. This was the year in which a million people crowded into Atlanta—still alive despite the ashes to which David Selznick had reduced it—for the ceremonial opening of Gone With the Wind. Confederate flags flew everywhere, and hawkers peddled Rhett caramels and Melanie molasses and Tara pecans, and when Vivien Leigh heard a military school band bleating “Dixie,” she said, “Oh, they’re playing the song from our picture.” There was a grand unreality about all the festivity, this celebration of defeat in a war long finished, as though nobody could understand that a much larger struggle had already begun. That September, a group of Selznick’s technicians had been carrying out one of their last tasks, filming the title itself—Gone With the Wind—pulling the camera along on a dolly so that each word could be framed separately, when Fred Williams, the head grip, turned on his radio and heard that Britain had declared war on Nazi”
― Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s

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“Grauman died of heart failure in the spring of 1950, died a bachelor, aged seventy-one, and the only people at his deathbed were his doctor, his secretary for the past twenty-one years, and the publicity chief of 20th Century—Fox. Long”
― Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s

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“After acknowledging that there had not been a single case of Japanese sabotage on the West Coast—indeed, there never was a single such case throughout the war—Lippmann wrote on February 20, that this meant nothing. “From what we know about the fifth column in Europe, this is not, as some have liked to think, a sign that there is nothing to be feared,” he declared. “It is a sign that the blow is well organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.” Japanese invaders might soon turn the whole Pacific coast into a battlefield, said Lippmann, and “nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.”
― Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s

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Polls

Our June 2018 reading

The Stranger by Albert Camus

8 votes, 32.0%

Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s by Otto Friedrich

7 votes, 28.0%

Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin

4 votes, 16.0%

City of Night by John Rechy

3 votes, 12.0%

Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes

2 votes, 8.0%

The Bird Artist by Howard Norman

1 vote, 4.0%

Room at the Top by John Braine

0 votes, 0.0%

In Between the Sheets by Ian McEwan

0 votes, 0.0%

25 total votes

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The Bowie Book Club: 27th reading - June 2018	6	27	May 25, 2018 08:28AM

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Otto Friedrich’s Followers (30)

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Otto Friedrich

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