About the author
Michael David Fried has held visiting and multi-year professor positions as a research mathematician at The Institute for Advanced Study, State University of New York at Stony Brook, University of Michigan, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tel-Aviv University, Hebrew University, Erlangen University, Essen University, University of California at Irvine (at the latter he is presently an Emeritus Full Professor of Mathematics). He held the following well-known fellowships: Sloan Mathematics Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, Lady David Fellowship, and an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellowship. Taylor Caldwell (TC) is his grandmother, Will Combs is his grandfather, and Peggy Fried is his mother. At the core of this biography was a manuscript of 900+ undivided, un-chaptered (and untitled) pages found in the home of Peggy Fried after her death in December of 2007. Fried has revised them and added considerable additional material. Part I is the story of TC during the time of Peggy's birth, her account of TC's idea of parenting through TC's first publication in 1938, and the subsequent period of Peggy's parenting until Peggy's children were gone. Peggy could then concentrate her uninterrupted attention on TC, whose off-and-on-again need for her took up the rest of her life. This Part I continues in Parts II and III, which present a strange symbiosis of parental abuse transferred through three generations, starting with a poor Scotch family: a dynamic story of the author who did much to define modern, anti-democratic conservatism.