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. While a student at CCNY, Fried and his friend Richard F. Shepard formed the Mundial Upheaval Society, which later flourished at Columbia University. Fried served in the
U.S. Army during
World War II, after one year of graduate work in anthropology at Columbia. In the Army, he was sent to Harvard to learn Chinese and he went on to specialize in the anthropology of
China, earning his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1951. ==Select bibliography==