BORN IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, Steve Fraser moved to Long Island when he was six. He quickly embraced the writer’s life and in second grade, he reviewed a Curious George story. “I thought it was a fabulous review. My teacher, however, pointed out that a review should not be longer than the book it was about, and that you shouldn’t retell a story that the original writer probably told better.” Crushed by her criticism, he later decided to become an editor so he could “tell people what was wrong with their writing.”
He is descended from Russian and Polish Jews and recalls family gatherings with great fondness. “It was more a tribe than a family,” he says. “My father was one of sixteen children—seven brothers and nine sisters. Their rather odd nicknames appear on the dedication page of Every Man a Speculator. The clan would meet monthly and included a growing swarm of cousins with whom I remain close to this day. Imagine if you can what it might be like to grow up among sixteen Marx Brothers—that should give you a sense of the zany hilarity that lit up my childhood.”
He came of age in the 1960s. “I was captivated by the political and countercultural movements of that time. Consequently I moved around a lot, from school to school, less interested in what I was learning in the classroom than in what I was absorbing outside of it.”
His favorite college experience by far involved his part in a successful conspiracy to “kidnap” and teach a class at Barnard College. “It was a high-spirited act of youthful rebellion. My fellow conspirators and I made off with the class by moving it to another building on campus. The most distinguished-looking of us posed as the professor and actually delivered three rather wacky, nonsensical lectures (which we wrote collectively in advance) before the plot was uncovered.”
His job history is a persuasive testament to the misapplied zeal of youth. “The most odious job I ever held was as a chicken disemboweler for Carolina Poultry on the Eastern Shore of Maryland when I was there working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I lasted three hours, in the course of which I removed the innards of nine thousand chickens; when the lunch whistle blew I was gone, and didn’t eat chicken for a long time after that.” He later found tidier, if riskier, employment. “My most recklessly audacious job experience was showing up at a garment factory at the age of twenty, claiming I was a cutter; a job about which I knew nothing and which turned out to require great skill. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice I was hitched to a cutting machine which came alive in my hands and quickly destroyed a ‘lay’ of fabric sixteen layers thick. At that point the boss, realizing I was faking it but impressed by my sheer brashness, reassigned me to the warehouse as an ‘order picker.’ There, in the warehouse, I couldn’t do myself or the company more serious harm.”
“Imagine if you can what it might be like to grow up among sixteen Marx Brothers.”
He settled down some years later and received his doctorate in American history from Rutgers University. He was for many years an editor. In due course, he “screwed up enough courage” to do some writing of his own. He is the author of Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor, winner of the 1991 Philip Taft Prize for the best book in labor history. Irving Howe, writing in the New York Review of Books, called the biography “a major achievement in American historical scholarship.” The Boston Globe called it “the best book available for understanding labor and politics in the first half of the twentieth century.”
He is also the coeditor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, a collection of ten essays which, said The Nation, “represents the cutting edge of historical scholarship on twentieth-century American political life.”
“My most recklessly audacious job experience was showing up at a garment factory at the age of twenty, claiming I was a cutter.”
The American Prospect offered singular praise for his writing. In its review of Every Man a Speculator, the magazine observed that those with urgent questions about Social Security, the welfare state, and the current economy “would do well to consult the collected works of Steve Fraser, who over the past couple of decades has emerged as a leading historian of American capitalism and the attempts to reform it.”
His writing has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and Dissent.
“Today,” he says, “I’m frustrated by my inability to keep up with the great quantity of important and compelling history, torn between my desire to read the literature closest to the areas in which I do my own research and writing and books far afield, like recent histories of the Spanish Empire at its height. I have for a long time also been intrigued by the relationship between conventional historical accounts of some time or event and the way novelists and other imaginative artists render them, which is one reason Every Man a Speculator discusses the works of Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Tom Wolfe, and others.”
He enjoys listening to music, playing tennis, and spending time with his family, which includes his wife, Jill, and his two children, Max and Emma.
“I am intrigued by the relationship between conventional historical accounts of some time or event and the way novelists and other imaginative artists render them.”
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