Scope and Content Note
The papers of Donald Sergey Friede (1901-1965) span the years 1919-1980, with the bulk from 1925 to 1965. Friede was an insider in the world of publishing for several decades and published, represented, or associated with influential and prize-winning authors. His father was a Russian immigrant who served as Ford Motor Company's representative to Czarist Russia. Because his father's business dealings required his family to move frequently, Friede lived in several of the world's principal cities and toured the globe twice before he was a teenager. As a result of his heritage and places of residence, he was fluent in four languages and was well connected financially.
Friede married six times and divorced five. He was expelled from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton universities and held nine different jobs in the first three years after leaving Princeton in 1920. He cofounded a publishing firm that went bankrupt, and he left numerous places of employment under diffficult circumstances. Despite turmoil in his professional and personal associations, Friede published or represented several well-known authors, among them Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, MacKinlay Kantor, Richard Gump, Ludwig Bemelmans, and Giorgio Lolli.
Friede's career is well documented by these papers. The Subject File contains correspondence and related attachments and reports concerning his associations with various authors and publishing firms. It is a professional file and contains little of a personal nature. The Writings File contains newspaper columns, short stories, and book-length works by Friede, both published and unpublished, with limited correspondence. The Miscellany File contains correspondence, daily activities diaries, passports, last wills and testaments, photographs, and other documentation regarding Friede's vital statistics, father, library, and death. This file also contains an appraisal of the Friede Papers. Notes by Friede's widow explaining numerous items have been placed with the materials that they describe.